The Emperor of Ocean Park (23 page)

Stuart nods slowly. He even finds a smile somewhere. “Very well. I had to give it a shot. I was fairly sure your answer would be what it was. And I respect you for it. But, you know, Talcott, there will be those around the building who will not.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You have many friends on this faculty, Talcott, but you have . . . well, there are those who are not fond of you. Surely this comes as no surprise.”

The curtain of red finally descends across my eyes. “What are you telling me, Stuart? Just spell it out.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, Talcott, if certain . . . pressures . . . were brought to bear on you, to try to get you to convince your wife to drop out, to let Marc have the seat. That is a most unfortunate fact, but it is still a fact. I would prefer that the school be otherwise, that we retain our collegiality, but, when the political bug bites one of our own, we behave less like Permanent Officers than like Temporary Schoolchildren.” He waits for me to grin at his small joke, but I do not. “I am afraid, Talcott, that some of the schoolchildren may try to . . . persuade you.”

“I don’t believe this. I don’t
believe
this.”

“I will not be a part of it, of course, and I will happily use my influence to protect you. But, Talcott, you have to realize that I, too, have enemies on the faculty. It may be that my influence is less than I might prefer.” He sighs, contriving to suggest that the school would be a better place if he were still at the top of the heap. Perhaps it would. Say what you want about Stuart Land, his only ambitions, ever, have been for the school.

“I understand.”

Stuart hesitates, and I realize he has not quite finished his sermon. “On the other hand, Talcott, if you are determined to go down this path, I think I might be rather helpful to you in Washington.”

“Oh?”

“I believe I might have some influence there, and, if I do, I would gladly use it to help your wife along.”

Which brings us, I see, to the point of the whole meeting. Tired of Stuart’s subtle politicking, I try some directness: “And in return for your help, you want me to do what?”

Stuart frowns and steeples his fingers again. I brace for another speech, but he gets to his feet instead. “Not everything has a quid pro quo, Talcott. Don’t be such a cynic. When you were young and untenured, you were more optimistic. I think the return of that peppy fellow would be a fine thing, for both you and the school.” He picks up the volume of Holmes’s collected papers he was reading when I came in, a signal of dismissal. But, before I have managed to excuse myself, he offers a revision of his point. “Of course, it is possible, Talcott, that you will have the chance later on to do the school a favor in return. If the opportunity arises, I assume you will take it.”

“I . . . I’m not sure what you mean, Stuart.”

“You’ll be sure when the time comes.”

Out in the hall, I feel a sudden chill. I realize now who it was that Stuart reminded me of during his lecture: Jack Ziegler, back in the cemetery, promising to protect my family, and asking me, in return, to tell him whatever I learn about
the arrangements.

I wonder, uneasily, if Stuart is asking for the same thing.

CHAPTER 12
A SPECIAL DELIVERY

(I)

E
LM
H
ARBOR
was founded in 1682, built around a trading post at the mouth of the State River. The original name of the town was Harbor-on-the-Hill, because the flatland near the water is so small and the ground slopes away from the harbor fast; and also because of the influence of John Winthrop’s sermon half a century earlier about the shining city on the hill. The city fathers were dour Congregationalists who came down the coast seeking religious freedom and immediately set about adopting laws to prohibit it to everybody else. So they banned, among other things, blasphemy, popery, exposing one’s ankles in public, idolatry, usury, disobeying one’s father, and doing business on the Sabbath. Although they would have been aghast to think they might be worshiping a graven image, they laid out their city in the shape of a cross, building it around two long avenues, an east-west road known in those days as The East-West Road and now known as Eastern Avenue, and a north-south road called North Road, later changed to The King’s Road, and now King Avenue.

The university opened its doors thirty years later, essentially a finishing school for dour Congregationalist men who wanted to study—along with their Bible—rhetoric, Greek and Latin, mathematics, and astronomy. The original campus was two wooden buildings in the long oval where King Avenue swings in a wide arc to follow the curve of the State River; that precious riverfront property is now owned by the medical school. Over the ensuing three centuries, the campus has spread like an aggressive cancer through the area west of King Avenue, invading one block, metastasizing on the next, demolishing whatever is in its way, or converting it to the university’s purposes. Clapboard homes have
come down, along with factories, schools, stores, flophouses, churches, mansions, warehouses, brothels, taverns, tanneries, and blocks upon blocks of tenements. In their place have risen libraries and laboratories and classrooms and offices and dormitories and administration buildings . . . and open space. Lots and lots of open space. The university likes to describe itself as Elm Harbor’s number one builder of parkland, even if nobody from the city dares tread on any of the school’s beautiful parks. The university has built museums and an aquarium and the region’s leading performing arts center. Its hospital is one of the best in the world. The university invests in the community, providing capital to build new housing and start small businesses. No institution in the area provides more jobs.

Or so say our press releases.

The university also buys up entire streets, closing them to traffic, constructs massive edifices for parking cars, but only the cars of students and faculty, and, with its private security force with full powers of arrest, creates an island of relative tranquillity, surrounded by an almost visible wall to keep the townies out.

Elm Harbor itself is demographically complex. About thirty percent of the residents are black, another twenty percent are Hispanic, and the rest are white—but so diverse! We have Greek Americans and Italian Americans and Irish Americans and German Americans and Russian Americans. The residents whom the Census Bureau arbitrarily labels Hispanic are largely of Puerto Rican descent, but many others trace their families to Central America—as do many of our black residents, who are otherwise about equally divided between West Indians and those whose most distant identifiable roots are in the South. The city is hopelessly sundered along these many lines, as we learn every three years in municipal elections, where the city council is an endlessly bickering rainbow, and as many as five or six different ethnic groups often field mayoral candidates in the Democratic primary. (The local Republican Party is a joke.) Only two things unite the multi-original residents of Elm Harbor: a shared hatred of the university, and a shared dream that their own children will one day attend it.

Kimmer does not like living here, and the university, although an occasional client, is one of the reasons.

And my own view? I am a fan of no city, and Elm Harbor, with its many problems, seems to me no worse than any other. What I have learned over the years from my colleagues—especially the great conservative Stuart Land and the great liberal Theo Mountain—is that
those of us who are members of the university community share a special responsibility for improving what Theo likes to call the metropole. The concept of responsibility, I know, is nowadays passé, especially the idea of obligation to those Eleanor Roosevelt used to call less fortunate than ourselves, but the Judge raised his children to it, and none of us can fully escape it. The Judge believed that his social conservatism demanded service: if the role of the state was going to be small, the role of volunteers had to be large. So Mariah holds parties for homeless children, Addison tutors inner-city high-school students . . . and I serve food.

(II)

T
HE SOUP KITCHEN
where I sometimes volunteer serves hot lunches to women and children at half past twelve each weekday in the basement of a Congregationalist church a block east of the campus, and it is the perfect place to forget mystery and death, for the difficulties in which its customers find themselves are far more profound than my own. As I sat in my office preparing for my torts class following the baffling conversation with Stuart Land, I felt its call. Trying to explain to my wary students the intricacies of comparative negligence, I knew I was botching it, and sensed Avery Knowland looking daggers any time my back was turned. When the class ended, I dumped the books in my office and rushed out the front door of the building.

The soup kitchen, I decided, is the only place for me just now.

Service, I remind myself as I descend the steps to the church basement. We are all of us called to actual service. Not just giving money, Theo Mountain likes to preach, and not fighting to change the law, either, for Theo considers the law a lost cause. Service to real people, who ache and cry and challenge us.

The manager of the soup kitchen, a seventyish Teutonic widow who insists that we call her Dee Dee, greets me with a scowl as I bound through the door a few minutes shy of opening time. Her cane snapping against the vinyl floor, Dee Dee follows me into the kitchen, where the rest of the staff is slicing several donated pizzas, baked yesterday and now desert-dry. “Setup is at noon,” she scolds me in her elegant voice as I pull on a pair of disposable latex gloves. “We expect everybody here by twelve-fifteen.”

“I had a class, Dee Dee. I’m sorry.”

“A
class.
”

“Yes.” Trying to think how my charming brother would handle Dee Dee. Badly, I bet.

Dee Dee, whose real name I have often been told and can never recall, is a small woman with carefully combed white-blond bangs and wide, solid shoulders. She wears floral-print shirtwaists and knee socks and sensible shoes. Her long, waxy face seems carved from some pallid stone, and her amazingly bright blue eyes often trick the uninitiated into thinking she can see. But Dee Dee is quite blind. She is also determined that our guests (as she calls them) will be treated with respect. We have colorful cotton tablecloths, which Dee Dee herself launders twice a week, vases of flowers on the tables, and strict rules that all food must be served from dishes, never from pots just off the stove or pans just out of the oven. Dee Dee insists that our guests say
Please
and
Thank you
and that the rest of us say
You’re welcome.
Volunteers who are rude receive one warning, after which they are not welcome back. Dee Dee has no authority to bar guests for being rude to the volunteers, but her dead-eyed glare, disconcertingly direct, keeps all but the most schizophrenic in line. Dee Dee runs, by her own gleeful admission, a very tight ship. Her blindness does not affect her ability to know at once, as though through some sightless telepathy, which of her volunteers is being careless in measuring portions of lasagna and which of her guests is trying to stuff an extra apple or two inside her sweater.

Or who is late.

Dee Dee puts her large hands on her small hips and leans away, her thin lips turned down as she lets me have it: “Are you saying that your class is more important than feeding these unfortunate women?” Then she smiles and pats my shoulder with amazing accuracy, letting me know that she is mostly joking.

Mostly.

But today of all days, I welcome her wit.

I take my place behind the counter, at the salad station today. A few of the other volunteers say hello.
Professor,
they call me, a kind of inside joke, although I had the same nickname in high school.
Hey, Professor!
call volunteers and clients alike.
What’s goin on, Pro?
I come to the soup kitchen for a million different reasons. One of them, the easiest to see, is service, the simple Christian duty to do for others. Another, always, is the need to be reminded of the diversity of the human race in general and the darker nation in particular: for the students and teachers who
represent African America at the university tend to run the gamut mainly from Oak Bluffs to Sag Harbor. And perhaps I have also come here today in part to do penance for my browbeating of poor Avery Knowland, whose insolence is hardly his fault. But even that is still too thin an explanation. This may simply be one of those Tuesdays on which the company of this happy band is preferable to the company of my colleagues, not because of a flaw in my colleagues but because of a flaw in me. There are days when time at the office is like time with the Judge, and the fact that he is dead and buried is irrelevant. At Oldie I am surrounded by people who fondly remember my father as a student: Amy Hefferman, his classmate; Theo Mountain, his teacher; Stuart Land, who was two years behind him in school; a few others. Despite the scandal that wrecked his career, my father’s portrait, like the portraits of all our graduates who have ascended to the bench, hangs on the wall in the vast reading room of the law library, which is one reason I spend little time there. Sometimes I feel suffocated by the role I am required to play:
Was Oliver Garland really your father? What did it feel like?
As though I am on campus principally to serve as an exhibit. I should never have allowed the Judge to persuade me to undertake the study of law where he had studied law before me; I cannot imagine what possessed me to decide that this was the right place to teach.

Maybe it was the fact that I had no other attractive offers.

Or that my father told me to do it.

I was a dutiful son in most things. My only act of rebellion was to marry Kimberly Madison, with whom I went to law school, when my family preferred her sister, Lindy, with whom I went to college. Kimmer, of course, is well aware of what my parents thought, as she reminded me two weeks ago in the steak house on K Street, and there are moments when the knowledge infuriates her, and other moments when she tells me she wishes I had done what I was expected to do. The trouble is I never loved Lindy, no matter what the Gold Coast seemed to think. And Lindy was never the least bit interested in me. If she had been, I suppose I would have married her, just as my parents wanted, and my life would have been different—not better, just different. I would not have Bentley, for example, which would be inestimably worse. On the other hand, some things would still be the same: the Judge would still be dead of a heart attack, and everybody would still be asking me what arrangements he made, and Freeman Bishop would still have been murdered, and Mariah would still be besotted with crazy theories.