The Emperor of Ocean Park (22 page)

“I think I know that,” I say, counterpunching but remaining respectful.

“In Europe, of course, this situation would be impossible.”

“Which situation?”

“They have a professional judiciary. You rise through the ranks. They consider rather unseemly the American system, under which . . . amateurs . . . may be appointed to an appellate court.”

“Well, we’re stuck with our system.” Although I am pretty sure my wife has just been insulted, I force a smile, not wanting to pick a fight with Stuart Land, the great Anglophile. I already have enough enemies around the building. “It’s worked out pretty well so far. No more than one scandal per decade.”

Stuart raises an eyebrow at my levity. Then he shrugs, as if to say responding to such nonsense is beneath his dignity. “Have you heard any news? About who might have the inside track?” Implying that my sources are better than his, which is unlikely. With the Republicans in the White House, Stuart probably could have had his pick of Washington jobs. Stuart Land, Lynda Wyatt’s predecessor as dean, and the man who persuaded me to return to my alma mater to teach, is among the most conservative members of our faculty. In the four years since his fall from power, Stuart has shown no signs of bitterness toward Lynda or Marc Hadley or Ben Montoya or Tish Kirschbaum or any of the several other professors who conspired to oust him. He continues to crisscross
the country in search of money for the law school, and our alumni, especially the older, wealthier ones, love him still and continue opening their wallets and checkbooks when Stuart calls. Indeed, many still refer to him as “the Dean,” maybe because it once seemed he would hold the job until he died, and if Lynda is envious of their affection, she hides it well.

It is not possible to get close to Stuart, although the more conservative professors hang around with him, and Lemaster Carlyle, who seems to get along with everybody, is a pal. As for myself, I will confess that I have never quite liked Stuart. But I have always admired him, not least because he was the only member of the faculty actually to testify in favor of my father’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. His integrity, moreover, is beyond question, which is why I was surprised and a little disturbed when he called me up just days after my return from Washington to suggest that I drop by for a chat.

Having nothing better to do at nine in the morning but sit in my office and feel sorry for myself, I agreed.

Stuart Land is a fussy little man whose vested suits with their pinstripes and broad lapels might be described as gangsta-like, except that he is white and crew-cut and somewhere north of sixty. His face is round and utterly without affect, his eyes are pale gray and glittering with fierce intelligence, and the half-glasses always perched on his nose make him look more censorious than professorial. His prim mouth is always ready with a word of sharp, witty disapproval. Nobody takes to him on first meeting, or second, but, somewhere along the way, a certain charisma emerges, and few of our students, even those on the left, manage to leave the law school without sharing in that general warm glow that everybody feels toward him.

This morning, however, Stuart is neither warm nor glowing. He exudes no charisma. He called me because he has a point to make, and, in true Stuart Land fashion, he chooses to make it through a series of gentle, indirect, yet very pointed assaults—the same style he uses in the classroom, and with which I was skewered more than once in the days when he taught me contracts.

“No, Stuart,” I report dutifully. Half my attention is still focused on Washington, where Mariah, unable to reach Warner Bishop, left him a message. I said nothing to her about the missing scrapbook. “We haven’t heard any news.”

“Neither has Marc. I gather he’s quite upset about the whole thing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Which is vaguely true.

“Marc isn’t a bad fellow, Talcott. You just have to get to know him.”

“I don’t have anything against Marc. I like him.”

Stuart frowns as though suspecting a lie. He drums his fingers. “He hasn’t been the scholar we hoped for when we hired him, of course. That writer’s block. But he really is a fine colleague, Talcott. A wonderful teacher. A brilliant mind. And, you know, when we hired you, Marc was one of your keenest backers.”

“I . . . had no idea,” I say truthfully. Unlike some law faculties, ours makes a fetish of confidentiality, and talking to people about who voted for or against them is considered to be somewhere between unethical and outrageous. Still, I have heard that Theo Mountain was my biggest booster, and during my first few years on the faculty, he and I were quite close. He was never quite my mentor—I have never really had one—but, until my father’s hard march to the right turned Theo into a carping critic, the two of us spent a lot of time together. Stuart Land, then the dean, was the man who actually persuaded me to quit the practice of law and come up to Elm Harbor to give teaching a try. He caught me at a good time: Kimmer and I were in the midst of one of our many estrangements. That she followed me to this city nine months later, and married me into the bargain, surprised me almost as much as it did our friends and families. And I have always wondered—although both parties deny it—whether Stuart might also have been responsible, somehow, for persuading my wife that the practice of law in Elm Harbor was not the hick job she imagined.

“Marc is a good man,” Stuart repeats. “As your wife is a good woman.”

“Yes,” I murmur, taking mental exception to the comparison as I wait patiently for the rest. Stuart has asked me here for a reason, and I know he is about to tell me what it is. I do not, however, have much energy to spend worrying about Marc Hadley’s feelings just now, even if he did back my appointment. The murder of Father Bishop, hard on the heels of the death of the Judge, has pretty much drained my wellspring of sympathy. Two nights of argument with Kimmer, whose position is still that there is nothing to worry about, exhausted the rest of my emotional self. Yet the main point I made to Stuart is correct: I do kind of like Marc Hadley, who is not much liked around the building. Marc, who has been teaching jurisprudence at the law school for eighteen years, is actually a fairly nice man. His son Miguel is one
of Bentley’s best preschool buddies, so we see Marc and his second wife, Dahlia, socially in the way that parents do: in the school parking lot, at birthday parties, on field trips to the fire station around the corner. We are not exactly intimates, Marc and I, but we always used to get along. And although Dear Dana considers Marc “overreputed”—a famous Worthism—he is, in my judgment, every bit as brilliant as his legend insists; it takes only a minute or two in his presence to sense that fantastic brain pulsing forth its great ideas. But if his intellect is one legend, his inability to produce any scholarship is another. His academic standing rests on his single book, published quite early in his career. He has published almost nothing since. He seems to have read every book ever written, on every subject, and is ready with a quotation for any occasion, but Marc himself suffers from one of the great writer’s blocks, a true monster of the species, and there are law reviews everywhere still waiting for articles he promised a decade ago. For a startling moment, I find myself sympathizing after all with Marc, who probably feels he needs the judgeship to prove his career has not been a waste. Then I shrug it off and am ready to fight for my wife again. “Two good people,” I echo, just to show I have not lost my place.

Stuart nods, then leans back in his chair, steepling his long fingers, signaling that he is about to deliver a little sermon. I admire Stuart, but I hate his sermons.

“I don’t like it when members of our faculty compete against one another,” he says sadly, his tone proposing that his opinion matters. “It’s not good for our collegiality. It’s not good for the school.” He points toward his wall of windows, through which one can see spires and towers and the huge, blocky library, the Gothic glory of the campus proper. “We are, first and foremost, a faculty. That’s what it means to be in a university. We are scholars, and those of us who have tenure, what the university calls ‘Permanent Officers,’ are supposed to be leaders in our fields. Not politicians, Talcott, but Officers. Scholars. Every one of us is charged with precisely the same responsibility: to immerse himself in a chosen discipline, and then to teach his students what he happens to discover. Anything that distracts from that task is injurious to our common enterprise. You see that, don’t you?”

I am somewhere between astonished and furious. Stuart is surely not taking the side of the man who orchestrated his own fall from power. I never thought Kimmer would have many supporters on the faculty, but I assumed that Stuart Land would be one.

“Do you see?” he says again. He does not wait to see whether I see. He continues his oration, raising an admonitory forefinger. “You know, Talcott, over my many years on this faculty, I have often been approached by this administration or that one, asking after my interest in some presidential appointment. A judgeship. Associate attorney general. Some post in an agency.” He smiles in soft reminiscence. “Once, during a scandal, the Reagan people asked if I would be willing to come down and clean up a Cabinet department. But every time, Talcott, I have declined. Every single time. You see, it is my experience, my invariant observation, that a professor who is bitten by the political bug ceases to be effective as a scholar. No longer is he studying the world and teaching what he discovers. He is, in effect, running for office, and it affects everything from the subjects he chooses for his writing to the arguments he is willing to press in the classroom. He worries about leaving a paper trail and, if he has one, spends his time cleaning it up. As you can imagine, when two members of the faculty find themselves both bitten by the political bug at the same time, and both in competition for the same single slot on a court, well, the deleterious effects are . . . oh, geometrically increased. Quadrupled.”

I cannot let this go on any longer. “Stuart, look. I appreciate what you’re saying. But my wife is not a member of the faculty.”

“Well, no, Talcott, you’re right. She isn’t.” Nodding as though he knew this before and I, the slower thinker, have just realized it. “Not formally.”

“Not even informally.”

“Well, your wife may not be faculty, but she’s family. Part of the law school family.”

I almost laugh at that one. In Kimmer’s ideal world, she would not even have to see the law school, much less think of herself as part of it. “Come on, Stuart. No matter what she is, the fact that she is in the running can’t possibly affect how she does her job around the law school if she doesn’t have a job around the law school.” Refusing to fall into Stuart’s cadences, in which the entire faculty is male.

The steely eyes hold mine. “Well, that isn’t quite the end of the matter, Talcott. That your wife is, as you put it, in the running could have an effect on
you.”

“On me?”

“Oh, yes, Talcott, of course. Why is that so hard to believe? Your wife wanting to be a judge, you not wanting to spoil her chances—why couldn’t such a situation lead to an excess of caution on your part?”

“An excess of . . .”

“Have you been yourself lately?” He chuckles to ease the blow. “The Talcott Garland we know and love? I think not.”

Enough is enough. “Stuart, come on. My father just died. And then the preacher who did the funeral . . .”

“Was murdered. Yes, I know. And I am terribly sorry.” He hunches forward, folds his small hands on the desk. “But, Talcott, listen to me. You’ve been distracted lately. A bit disorganized.” Then, to my surprise, a shrug. “But this is wide of the point . . . .”

“Wide of the point! You just said the competition is affecting how I do my job!”

“And perhaps I was speaking out of school. Maybe it’s none of my business. Maybe I was merely speculating. The truth is, I was not thinking about how you do your job. I was thinking about Marc.”

“What about Marc?” I demand, anger still burning fiercely, even though I am utterly confused. A moment ago Stuart thought I was distracted and disorganized. Now it is none of his business.

“Marc is not doing his job well. I think the competition may be too much for him.”

“Then why are you talking to me instead of to Marc?” Stuart says nothing, but only stares, scarcely blinking. I feel a little heady, an odd déjà vu, even though I cannot say what it is I am reexperiencing. I try again. “Did Marc put you up to this? Did he ask you to talk to me? Because if he did . . .”

“Nobody put me up to anything, Talcott. My only concern is this school.” Talking as though he is still the dean. “And I know that, like me, you want what is best for the school.”

“You’re not suggesting . . . You don’t think . . .” I stop, swallow the surging red anger, and try again. “I mean, if you’re suggesting that I should tell my wife to drop out of the process, to give up her chance to be a federal judge, for the good of the law school or the good of Marc Hadley . . . well, Stuart, I’m sorry, but that isn’t going to happen.”

“It is just possible, Talcott, that the good of the school and the good of Marc Hadley are, in this case, identical.”

“What do you mean by . . . Oh!” Did I happen to mention that Stuart Land is devious? I should have seen it earlier. Naturally he wants to help Marc obtain his treasured judgeship. Probably Marc could not have been a finalist without his help, for Stuart may be the only member of the faculty whom the administration would trust to vouch for the
truth of Marc’s own repeated assertion that he is a political liberal but a judicial reactionary. And why would Stuart assist the ambition of the man most responsible for his downfall? Because, if Marc were to become a judge, Stuart would be rid of him at last; and Dean Lynda, his rival, would lose the cornerstone on which her power base in the faculty is built.

Stuart has a hoary witticism to offer: “Perhaps Marc Hadley’s departure from the law school to join the bench would enhance the quality of both institutions.”

Again I choose my words with care. “I appreciate your point of view, Stuart. I really do. But Kimmer is more deserving of this seat than Marc is. I am not about to suggest to her that she withdraw her name.”