The Emperor of Ocean Park (37 page)

Justice Wainwright—Mr. Justice Wainwright, they would have said in the grand old sexist tradition—is very much an insider, for he knows everybody. Everybody, that is, who matters in Washington. Small wonder that he, alone among the Justices, attended my father’s funeral. He attends every wedding in town, so why not every burial? As I look around the room at his grand blue carpet and grander wooden desk, my eyes light upon his ego wall, a montage of photographs of the Justice with everybody from Mkhail Gorbachev to Bob Dylan to the Pope. There is a photograph of a stern Wainwright in Marine dress uniform, and another frame holds his decorations. There is a photograph of a smiling Wainwright with a clutch of babies in his lap: grandchildren, I suppose. The remaining walls are lined with solid wooden bookshelves holding the hundreds of cream-colored volumes of the United States Reports, the official record of the decisions of the Supreme Court, even though, in this digital age, no lawyer under the age of thirty opens the books any more, for everything in the books is also online (or so, unfortunately, young lawyers believe). I shake my head, trying and failing to envision my father in this magnificent office, had things gone otherwise. A wave of fatalism sweeps over me, the sense that nothing anybody could have done would have changed the inevitable outcome.

Nothing.

Wallace Wainwright, with his fine political eye, notices my uneasiness, puts a hand on my elbow, and directs me to a plush blue sofa. He perches on a hard wooden chair standing catercorner to it. Over his shoulder, through the high window, is a view of the Capitol building, its massive dome dull gray in the unkempt drizzle that is so predictable a part of a Washington December. Despite the weather, I revel in the delicious independence of the truant. I am playing hooky this wet afternoon
from the conference on tort reform that is paying the expenses for my visit to the city; I am insufficiently grand to be missed. Yet, now that I am seated in Wainwright’s chambers, the appointment arranged by Rob Saltpeter, who clerked for Wainwright years ago, I try to figure out how to begin. I fidget like a nervous first-year student forced unwillingly to recite a case.

Wallace Wainwright waits. And waits. He can afford to wait, or not to wait, as he likes. He knows who he is. He sits at the summit of the legal world and has nobody left to impress. His suit is mousy and shapeless and brown, more what you find in the secondhand shops down in Southeast than what you expect a Supreme Court Justice to wear. His old narrow tie is askew. His blue shirt is poorly pressed and unevenly tucked. Despite his impressive name, Wallace Wainwright comes, as the Judge used to say in some astonishment, from no particular background. The Wainwright family, again according to my father, was Tennessee trailer trash. Wallace, the middle brother among five, lied and cajoled and borrowed his way through UT, attended Vanderbilt’s law school on a scholarship, and, in his early years of law practice, sent half his paycheck home, sometimes more if somebody from his vastly extended family needed surgery or the down payment for a car. Yet nowadays he lives in a small but pricey row house in Georgetown, with a huge country place for the weekends, twenty-five acres with horses for his daughters to ride, out near the town of Washington, sometimes called “Little Washington,” in the middle of the Virginia hunt country. My father used to shake his head, bemused that his onetime colleague married rather well.

Associate Justice Wallace Warrenton Wainwright, the intellectual giant.

The man of the people.

The darling of the legal academy.

The last of the great liberal judges.

And the closest thing my father had to a friend when they sat together on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the real reason I have come. Despite their marked ideological differences, the two men were united in the belief that their minds were greater than those of the other judges on the court, a condescension not infrequently reflected in their dissenting opinions. It occurs to me that a court can be a little like a law school, or at least like mine. There are tiers, at least in the minds of those who
assign themselves to the highest one. Judges Garland and Wainwright believed themselves to occupy a tier of their own, much to the resentment, so I have heard from Eddie Dozier, of the rest of the court. Although my father was perhaps a decade older than Wainwright, they used to pal around outside the courthouse too, playing golf and poker and fishing a bit, back before scandal destroyed my father’s career. Even afterward, Wainwright tried to keep in touch, but eventually—so Addison has told me—the strain on my father was too much. The Judge was sitting still, even tumbling downward, and his old friend Wallace was still climbing the ladder. When the Democrats recaptured the White House, everybody knew that Wainwright would fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Everybody was right.

We sit in silence a moment longer, as I try to force myself to press forward. But the depression that has characterized the past couple of months has seized me once more, slowing my reason, increasing my doubts and fears. This morning I dropped by Corcoran & Klein, where Meadows, as promised, let me look around my father’s empty corner office just down the hall from Uncle Mal’s. Mrs. Rose, who was the Judge’s assistant forever, is long gone, retired and moved to Phoenix. The room itself was truly empty: after the new carpet, repainting, and drapes, not even the Judge’s ghost would be hanging around. But the inspection was just for show. I really dropped in to buy Cassie Meadows a cup of coffee so that I could have her undivided attention and watch her spontaneous reaction when I asked her whether my father had left behind one of those if-anything-should-happen-to-me notes.

Meadows never flinched. She thought it over, tapping a long finger against nearly invisible lips. “If he did, I wouldn’t be privy to it. That kind of thing would be more Mr. Corcoran’s department than mine.”

The response I expected. I knew the answer to my next question before I asked it: No, Mr. Corcoran isn’t in. He’s away in Europe for a few weeks.

(II)

“I
T’S GOOD OF YOU
to see me,” I begin, feeling awkward and childish in the face of this physical, human reminder of all my ambitious father sought to attain . . . and failed to achieve.

“Nonsense,” Wallace Wainwright huffs, with a surreptitious look at his watch—a Timex for the man of the people—before settling in his uncomfortable chair, crossing his bony legs, folding his large hands on his knee, which he at once begins to jiggle. “I’m just sorry we haven’t had the chance to sit down in so long.”

“It has been a long time,” I agree.

“How’s your lovely wife?” the Justice asks, even though I am fairly sure he has never laid eyes on Kimmer in his life. He is famous for a twisted, kindly smile, and he displays it now. Learned articles have been written on its significance. “I understand you have a couple of children now. Or is it just the one?”

“Just Bentley. He’s three.”

“A wonderful age,” he says, filling the time with these irrelevancies. I do not know whether he is trying to put me at my ease or to put me off. “I remember when mine were three. Well, not all at once,” he adds pedantically. “But I remember each of them.”

“You have three children? Is that what I remember?”

“Four,” he corrects me gently, ending my effort to show that I, too, am a social being. “All girls,” he muses. “An intriguing variety of ages.”

Still he waits.

Nowhere to go but forward.

“Mr. Justice, I wanted to talk to you, if you are willing, about my father.” He raises his eyebrows in gentle inquisition, and waits some more. “About those last couple of years he spent on the bench. Before . . . well, before what happened.”

“Of course, Misha, of course.” Charming as ever. Years ago, honoring his friendship with my father, I invited Wainwright to call me by my nickname, and he has never stopped. “Those were difficult years. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for you, and I am so sorry about it all.”

“Thank you, Mr. Justice. I know what your friendship meant to the . . . to my father.”

Justice Wainwright smiles again. “Oh, well, he was a very special man. He meant a great deal to me. A giant, an absolute giant. The finest judicial craftsman it has ever been my privilege to know. I suppose you would have to say he was my mentor on the bench. Yes. What happened . . . well, it does nothing to alter my admiration for him.” A pause, now that he has made his little speech. “Yes. So. What would you like to know?”

Here goes. “Well, I was wondering . . . not about the days after what happened, but the days before. When he was nominated in the first place. Around then. What was going on. Including what was, or wasn’t, going on with Jack Ziegler.”

“You know, it’s interesting. Interesting. Nobody has asked me about any of this, not even when the Congress”—
the
is his affectation, as are the studied repetitions and pauses that give him time to think—“was doing all those investigations. A few reporters, I guess, who somehow wangled my home number. Reporters. Of course I didn’t talk to
them.”
Like most judges, Wallace Wainwright regards journalists in the way that the human body probably views the
E. coli
bacterium: you know you need a little of it for everything to work right, but you still kind of keep hoping somebody will kill it off. “There’s been a great silence about your father, Misha. A silence. Yes. I mean about what it was like in the courthouse in those days. And maybe that’s best.”

I hesitate. Is he warning me away or drawing me in? I do not know. I cannot read the signs. So I press my own agenda instead. “That’s what I want to know, I guess. What it was like in the courthouse. What my father was like in those days.”

“What it was like.” Repeating my line, repeating his, the Justice recrosses his long legs and leans back in his chair. He is looking now not at me but at the ceiling, where, perhaps, he is reading the waves and currents of memory. “Well. Yes. You have to remember that, at the time all of this happened, your father was a nominee for the Supreme Court.”

“I know that.”

He catches my impatience and patiently corrects it. “Well, you know and you don’t know. You have to have a sense of what a court is like when one of the judges is headed for the high bench—or when everybody thinks he is headed that way, anyway. I’ve been through that several times. Several times. I was there for Bob Bork. For Oliver Garland. For Doug Ginsburg.” A wry smile. “Of course, when I list the names that way, I guess you could say the odds are not very good from the D.C. Circuit.”

I smile back.

“But, still, even though none of those nominees . . . ah, none of them prevailed . . . even so, at the time of the announcement, the atmosphere was, well, special.”

“Special how?” I prompt.

“Well,” says the Justice again. “Well, now, at first, when Reagan announced that he was nominating your father? Nobody was entirely surprised, but, still, there was this . . . this excitement around the place. Your dad, well, he was always an impressive figure, but, after the news was out, he kind of . . . when he walked down the hall, into the courtroom, wherever, it was kind of . . . well, breathtaking, I suppose. Breathtaking. I mean that literally. It was as though he was incandescent, burning the oxygen right out of the air. I don’t know what the word is. Magic, maybe. People did not exactly fawn over him. No. Come to think of it, it was just the opposite. People drew back a little bit, grew . . . mmmm, let’s say diffident, as though he was being elevated to some higher plane of existence, and the rest of us mortals were no longer fit company. No longer fit. Not a king, but . . . a crown prince! That’s the analogy. There was this . . . this glow. Incandescent,” he repeats.

I nod, hoping he will get to the point. Wainwright’s judicial opinions have this same scattered quality, full of weak allusions and awkward metaphors. Law professors reward him for this literary confusion by referring to his writing as stylish. But perhaps my own tendency to drabness makes me envious.

“Well. Your father handled it all beautifully.
We
might have been diffident, the other judges, and, especially, the law clerks, but your father was as friendly as always.” Another smile, soft, reminiscing, and I wonder whether he is teasing, for the Judge was many things, some of them admirable, but none of them friendly. “You know, now that I think about it, I suppose your father had a lot of time to prepare himself, to think about how he would behave if lightning struck. You might remember that it was not exactly a surprise. Your dad was one of the finalists, it was in all the papers, and, besides, people were talking about your dad even back in ’80, right after the election. Yes. Right after the election. Come to think of it, when Reagan was elected, some right-winger or other—excuse me, no offense to your father—but somebody from one of those terribly conservative think tanks was quoted in the newspaper about your father as the possible successor to Justice Marshall. He said something offensive, something like, ‘I hope Thurgood is keeping Oliver’s seat warm.’ Words to that effect.”

I have forgotten the atmosphere of the time, but Justice Wainwright’s tale brings it tumbling back. I even remember, for the first time in years, the quote he mentioned. I was outraged by it, and so was
nearly everybody else I knew, including my father. Outraged by the presumption, for instance, that there could be only one black Justice at a time. And by the presumption that the speaker was on a first-name basis with both my father and the great Thurgood Marshall. And then the racist choice—there is no other way to put it—to call both jurists by their first names. I cannot recall any similar quote along the lines of “I hope Lewis is keeping Bob’s seat warm”—not when the Justice and the potential nominee were both white. My father, for a strange, shining, sacrificial moment, pondered removing himself from all consideration as a future member of the Court, out of respect for Justice Marshall, before flaring ambition triumphed once more.