Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  The guilty should be punished—no question there.

  But guilt comes in more than one variety. And so does punishment.

  Addison. Now, there is a question nobody has raised, although Nunzio hinted around the edges. Alma said Addison could not be the head of the family. Sally said Addison told her to get the scrapbook Mallory Corcoran said my father thought Addison had betrayed him. And my father’s arrangements involved the younger son, not the older, whom he also loved best among his children. Could the reason be that Addison already knew it all? My brother said the Judge came to him in Chicago a year before he died, trying to get him to read Villard’s report. This, surely, was in reaction to Wainwright’s visit. My father’s immediate idea was to tell his firstborn everything, so that Addison would be his insurance policy if anything went wrong.

  Only Addison wouldn’t play. I know he read the report, he knew the car that killed Abby had two people in it, not one. Maybe the Judge told my brother what happened next. Maybe Addison worked it out for himself. Either way, it upset him enough that he refused to listen to any more of the story. He did not want to know what the Judge did for Jack Ziegler in return for the murders of Phil McMichael and Michelle Hoffer. And my father, as he told Uncle Mal, and as Just Alma knew or guessed, took this for a betrayal.

  So he went on to his second son. Only, this time, he was more cautious. Worried, perhaps, that I would be as rejecting as Addison, he decided to leave me no choice, to design his arrangements the way he would design one of his chess problems, so that, once he died, events would be set into motion, and I would be able to follow only one path. The path that would lead me to Vinerd Howse, and to the attic, and to George Jackson.

  Probably he hoped I would figure it out the first time I saw the note.

  Or maybe Addison’s involvement was not limited to telling the Judge he wanted no involvement. After all, somebody had to put the Judge’s files on the disk. My father would not have known how to do it himself; but Addison loves computers. Maybe Addison gave him instructions, maybe Addison did it for him. Either way, my brother would have had at least a rough idea of what the Judge had hidden, and why, even if he did not know where. So, why did he refuse to help Mariah and me in our separate searches? Why, when I finally reached him, did he try to talk me out of going forward?

  The same reason he arranged for Sally to remove the scrapbook. Because he was there in the kitchen at Shepard Street the night the Judge first tried to make his deal with the devil. Because he had buried that secret for more than twenty years. And because he was not ready to have it exhumed.

  No wonder he never found time to come to the hearings.

  I miss Addison. Not the way he is now, but the way he used to be. The way it was before, as the Judge would have said. I seem to miss the same thing in every corner of my life: the way it was before. I experience my family life as an unbroken chain of losses. My brother, my sister, my wife, my mother, my father, all of them gone but Mariah. Morris Young, like the Judge when he was at his best, preaches that we should always be looking forward, not back, and I try. Oh, how I try.

  I have lost my wife. My father, for all his insanity, never lost his Claire, not until the day she died. In the last few years, I have been so obsessed with my father—first with living up to his standards, and, recently, with solving the terrifying mystery he thrust upon me—that I have scarcely given my mother a thought. It is time to correct the imbalance. It is time to get to know Claire Garland again, to study her life as painstakingly as I have studied Oliver’s. I have been trying to find a place for my father in the way I remember the past. I must do the same for my wife. And I must spend enough time remembering my mother that she, too, can finally take a proper place in the rooms of my memory. If memory is our contribution to history, then history is the sum of our memories. Like all families, mine has a history. I would like to remember it.

  (III)

  BENTLEY AND MIGUEL are down in the basement now, whispering together, the way best friends do at that age. I check on the little fire I have going this cold afternoon, then climb the stairs to the second floor, go into my small bedroom, and close the door. I sit on my cheap mattress-and-box-spring bed and stare at the dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. From his perch atop the dresser, George Jackson seems to wink at me with dark plastic eyes. The disk, undisturbed, its information leaching away, remains inside him. The diabolical scrapbook is tucked away in a drawer, hidden beneath my underused exercise togs.

  I close my eyes and remember Wainwright’s flailing hand. I open them and remember his despairing words, how he wanted to retire and Jack Ziegler and his partners refused to let him step down. Probably Wainwright was the unnamed buyer who tried to purchase the house on Shepard Street, so that he would be able to search it top to bottom. Eventually he would have offered to purchase Vinerd Howse, too. With contents, no doubt.

  Contents like Abby’s bear.

  A flash of lightning outside reflects in George Jackson’s plastic eyes, making him wink again. He is magical, this ancient toy shedding his stuffing. I am astonished that he survived the storm, but storms are funny that way: sometimes what the riptide draws out bobs to the surface and floats back in on the next crashing wave, other times it is sucked under and disappears. The jetties extending from the sands of the Inkwell probably made his return more likely, turning some of the waves back in; but, the truth is, I got lucky.

  Or maybe not. Had George never returned to shore, had the police officer never found him, had I remained unconscious, had a dozen small things been different, I would not now be facing this dilemma. Had the waves carried the bear away, I would not have to worry about what to do. There would be nothing to do, because there would be no disk to do it with.

  No arrangements.

  Jack Ziegler and his friends or enemies or whoever they are decided after the cemetery that I probably had already found the information my father hid, and I implicitly promised Henderson that I would keep secret what I knew. Now the belief is a fact: the arrangements are mine at last, and I feel the surging stir of temptation that power always brings.

  I pick up the bear, slide the disk free, and put George back where he was. Holding the disk by its edges, I walk back down to my living-dining room. Outside the windows, the storm has yet to abate. True, it cannot hold a candle to the one that roared across the Vineyard while I was there, but a storm is a storm, and, despite the fire, the condo is growing colder.

  Or maybe I am.

  I remember my father’s dream, to gain a measure of fame by creating the first Double Excelsior with the knight, the task that crazy old Karl called impossible. The Double Excelsior, but with black victorious in the end: two lonely pawns, one white and one black, pathetic in their powerlessness, beginning on their home squares and matching each other, move for move, until, on the fifth turn, each reaches the far end of the board and becomes a knight, the final move checkmating the white king. And the problem is not sound if there is any other option: a single line of play is all that is allowed. If the black king can be checkmated more quickly, or if either pawn can at any time make any other move and yet achieve the same result, the problem is cooked, which is to say, worthless.

  My father left his Double Excelsior behind him, not on the board but in life, setting in motion his two pawns, one black, one white, matching moves, each stalking the other, one agonizing square at a time, until they reached the far side of their board on a storm-darkened beach in Oak Bluffs, where they faced each other for the final time.

  One knight died. The other is left to give mate. Just as my vengeful father wanted. I hold in my hand the tool. I need only pick up the telephone and call Agent Nunzio or the Times or the Post, and the Judge’s Double Excelsior is complete.

  Except that the problem is cooked, as the jargon has it, if there is any other possibility. And the difficulty with knights is that they often move … eccentrically.

  Impossible, said Karl.

  The boys
are running around the house again. In a few minutes, I will have to give them a snack, warming one of the countless casseroles that Nina Felsenfeld and Julia Carlyle have delivered. Then the three of us will squeeze into the Camry for the short drive up to the Hadleys’ lovely home on Harbor Peak. I believe I have mentioned that Marc comes from money. Years ago, his Uncle Edmund was one of the founders of a little leveraged-buyout firm called Elm Harbor Partners. Kimmer had no conflict of interest, the Hadley money has long moved on, but I know from Dana, who should never have told me, that Marc once made a telephone call to the old family retainer who was then general counsel of EHP, urging him, as a favor, to ask for Kimberly Madison by name the moment she arrived in town. The request was part of the effort by Stuart Land, then the dean, to keep me from leaving, for I was as dreadfully unhappy during my first year in Elm Harbor as I had been during my final year in Washington. Had Marc not made the call, Kimmer might not have stayed; had she not stayed, she and I would never have married; which helps explain why I have never been able to dislike Marc as much as my wife does.

  Marc has been man enough never to mention this favor to me. I do not think Kimmer knows. And I am not about to tell her. Besides, EHP might have asked for Kimmer as a favor to Marc, but it was through her exemplary skills as a lawyer that she earned her way into their—and Jerry Nathanson’s—lasting confidence.

  I check my watch and go into the cramped kitchen to warm the boys’ snack. So much to do, so much to do. I want to be a better Christian, to spend time with Morris Young and learn the meaning of the faith I profess. I want to take more walks with Sally, apologize for the family, and help her, if I can, to heal. I want to visit Just Alma, to sit at her feet and listen to stories of the old days, when the family was happy—the way it was before. Then I want to visit Thera, and compare the stories. I want to help my sister out of her ennui. I want to believe in the law school the way Stuart Land does. I want to believe in the law itself the way I used to, before the Judge and his pal Wainwright shattered my faith.

  And there is something else. I want to know what happened to Maxine. I want to know why she shot me, whether it was an accident, and, if not, on whose orders she did it. I want her to look me in the eye and tell me she was not working for either Jack Ziegler or the unknown partners with whom he conspired to murder Phil McMichael and his girlfriend and to corrupt the federal court of appeals. Maybe she can even make me believe it. In which case Maxine was working, just as she said, for the good guys—not the great guys, just the good guys, who vowed to destroy whatever my father left, rather than use it. Another faction? Another mob? Another federal agency?

  I want to know why, despite my fervent prayers as I lay dying, so I thought, on the beach last week, I never saw her again.

  Uncle Jack said some questions have no answers. Perhaps one day soon I will fly out to Aspen again and knock on his door and ask him a few anyway. And, if I do, I suppose I will owe him thanks of some kind for keeping me and my family safe all these months, when we could have been kidnaped, tortured, and murdered. Except that, had he not been who he was and done the things he did, we would never have needed protection in the first place.

  The telephone rings, distracting me from my reverie, and I pick it up, reasoning that there is no more bad news to be had. As I should have guessed, it is my sister, calling to tell me about the new evidence she has found down at Shepard Street or on the Internet or floating in a glass bottle someplace: my stubborn mind refuses to focus on her words, which become a stream of noise, unrelated to any part of my reality. I surprise us both by interrupting her.

  “I love you, kiddo.”

  A pause while Mariah waits for the punch line. Then her cautious yet happy rejoinder: “Well, that’s a good thing, because I love you, too.”

  Another pause, as each of us silently dares the other to get mushy. But we are Garlands still, we are at our emotional limit, so conversation turns swiftly to her family. She promises not to try any matchmaking if I will come for her annual Labor Day barbecue. I agree. Five minutes later my sister is gone—but I know she will go on searching. Which is fine with me. Let Mariah continue to try to prove the Judge was murdered; that is her way of coping, and, with her journalistic tenacity, she may yet uncover a further unhappy truth. I admire her search but will not join it. I have long been comfortable living without perfect knowledge. Semiotics has taught me to live with ambiguity in my work; Kimmer has taught me to live with ambiguity in my home; and Morris Young is teaching me to live with ambiguity in my faith. That truth, even moral truth, exists I have no doubt, for I am no relativist; but we weak, fallen humans will never perceive it except imperfectly, a faintly glowing presence toward which we creep through the mists of reason, tradition, and faith.

  So much to know, so little time. Wandering back into the living room, I stare at the cracked, warped disk in my hand, wishing I could unlock its secrets by sheer force of will, because knowing precisely what my father included, whether fact or fiction, could help me decide what to do. But I lack the time, or the trust, to do as John Brown recommends and hire somebody to decipher it. I will have to make my decision—my decision—based on the little I already know. To be a man is to act.

  I notice that the fire is sputtering. Well, I can’t have that on so chilly an afternoon. Back when Kimmer and I were more or less happy, snuggling in front of the fire was one of our favorite pastimes. If it is as brisk up on Hobby Road as it is down here by the beach, she is surely snuggling away. Just not with me.

  I miss what I had. The way it was before.

  But I can love a fire anyway.

  I throw on another log and watch a few sparks fly. Not enough: the fire needs to be freshened. Seeing no kindling anywhere, I take the disk my father hid in Abigail’s bear and, drawing a line and putting the past behind me, I feed it to the flames.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. It stems from my imagination. It is not a roman à clef on law teaching, or the bizarre process by which we confirm (or fail to confirm) Supreme Court Justices, or the tribulations of middle-class black America, or anything else. It certainly is not the tale of my own family nuclear or extended. The story is just a story, and the characters are my own inventions, with the exception of a handful of genuine lawyers, legislators, and journalists who play peripheral but wholly fictitious roles.

  My imaginary law school is not modeled on Yale, where I have taught for two happy decades, and my imaginary city of Elm Harbor is not a thinly disguised New Haven, although the careful reader will notice that the two communities share a few of the same ghosts. None of Misha Garland’s rumbling complaints about his colleagues or students should be taken as representing my opinions of my own colleagues or students, whom I treasure and respect.

  My character Oliver Garland, Misha’s father and a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, bears no connection whatever with the Honorable Merrick Garland, an actual judge of that very court, who was appointed long after my fictitious Garland family was invented. By that time it was too late to change the family name: they were already alive for me.

  I have taken certain liberties with the geography of Martha’s Vineyard, especially the wonderful village of Menemsha, where the shoreline behind the restaurants and shops is not lined with the fishing shacks that Misha investigates, and where I have never met anybody as selfish and unpleasant as the fisherman with whom Misha argues. The view of Oak Bluffs Harbor from the park where Misha and Maxine have their heart-to-heart is actually obscured nowadays by a hideous public bathhouse, but I prefer to remember the beauty of the vista before the monstrosity was built, so it does not exist in this novel. The Edgartown Road, as it nears the airport, is far flatter in reality than it is in my story. My only excuse is that the narrative works better if there are steep hills. The ancient wooden staircase from Seaview Avenue down to the Inkwell would not really be straight across the grass from a house on the south side of Ocean Pa
rk, but I needed it there, so I moved it a few hundred yards west of its actual location.

  In 1997, the town of Gay Head was officially renamed Aquinnah, but, like Misha Garland and many who love the Island, I find the usage of three decades difficult to overcome. I am sure I will learn to do better with time. In Oak Bluffs, neither Murdick’s Fudge nor the Corner Store would likely be open the week after Thanksgiving, when Misha and Bentley visit them, but I have taken a bit of poetic license to make late autumn on Circuit Avenue a little cheerier in my story than in real life. It is unlikely that Misha could have taken his car back and forth to the Island as often as he does in the story, because reservations for the auto ferry are scarce and the standby possibilities greatly reduced from what they once were. But one is permitted to dream.

  Washington, D.C., is also not precisely the same in my novel as it is on the map. In particular, the downtown branch of Brooks Brothers moved a few years ago from its quiet location on L Street to a somewhat fancier and busier corner on Connecticut Avenue. But the new establishment is too close to Dupont Circle for the story to work, so I have kept the store where it sat for so long.

  I have altered the history of America’s past two decades in minor but noticeable respects, and I hope that none of the true-life figures whose lives I have rudely shoved around to fit the story will be offended. On the other hand, some things the reader may suspect are inventions are not. The ProLife Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, to take one example, is a real organization, and one of its national officers did indeed say to me, more or less in so many words, “Everybody hates us.”

  I am grateful to David Brown, a columnist for Chess Life magazine, for teaching me some of the intricacies of the chess problem that forms a part of the book’s motif. I am also grateful to George Jones, Esq., a partner in the law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, L.L.P., a former member of the American Bar Association’s standing committee on ethics, and president of the District of Columbia bar (2002–3), for guiding me through some thorny questions about the rules governing the lawyer-client relationship, and to Natalie Roche, M.D., FA.C.O.G, at the time on the staff of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City for helpful conversations about medical problems that can occur during childbirth. Any errors that occur in the story, whether in these areas or any others, are mine, or perhaps my characters’.