The Emperor of Ocean Park (56 page)

I repeat my refusal.

But he will not give up. He says I wouldn’t really need to speak for my father. I could talk about whatever I wanted, express any views I wanted. A couple of his clients, he adds, are very excited at the thought of having me come. All they ask is a lecture to a small group, a dinner with people who are great fans of my father, some reminiscences about the Judge, insights into his thinking. Just two or three dates, he murmurs.

At twenty to thirty thousand dollars apiece.

A debilitating worm of temptation is inching through me, thrilling and warm, as I think again of our debts. Then I remember what Morris Young said the other night about Satan, and I call a halt, rather rudely, to the conversation. “My
no
means
no,
” I tell him.

He says he will try me again in a month or two.

An hour later, Just Alma finally calls me back. She is still in the islands, whatever that means. I have forgotten why I called her in the first place, so I ask her how she is enjoying herself instead. She complains that the men can’t keep up with her. I imagine this is true.

Then I remember and say: “Alma? Do you remember when we were down at Shepard Street? Right after the funeral?”

Over the scratchy line, she acknowledges that she does.

“You told me people would . . . come after me. Remember?”

“Your daddy told me. He said folks always came after the head of the Garland family.”

“Did he say . . . which folks?”

“Sure. The white folks,” she says at once, and my theory goes to pieces. I thought perhaps the Judge had shared with Just Alma a piece of his secret. Instead, more ramblings of his tortured mind in which everything that happened to him was somebody else’s fault.

“I see.”

Alma is not finished. “The way the white folks went after Derek.”

“Derek as in his brother? The Communist?”

“You know some other Derek? Lemme tell you something, Talcott. Your daddy, he never liked his brother, not till after he was dead. Even when they were kids, he never liked him. Never.”

“I know, Alma.” I am trying to bring the conversation to an end, but Alma rides right over me.

“Main thing was, Talcott, your daddy thought Derek complained too much about the white folks. Well, turned out the white folks got your daddy too. So he started to think maybe Derek had a point. Used to say he wished old Derek was still around, so he could tell him how sorry he was.”

“My father said he was sorry?” I try, and fail, to recall a single instance of the Judge’s ever apologizing. “What was he sorry about?”

“He was sorry they split up. Said everything went bad after that.”

“Everything like what?”

“Goodness, Talcott, I don’t know. He just said he was sorry. Because of what the white folks did. I guess maybe he just missed his brother.”

A question occurs to me. “Alma? When my father talked about splitting up with his brother—was there something particular he meant?”

“I guess when your daddy decided to be a judge and all that. He kind of had to leave all the baggage behind.”

“Derek was baggage?”

“Your daddy just missed him, Talcott, that’s all.”

This is getting me nowhere. I have to go. Fortunately, so does Alma. We talk about seeing each other over the summer, but we won’t.

(IV)

N
IGHT ON
H
OBBY
R
OAD
. Once more I keep my lonely vigil from the front window. I do not know what I am looking for. Around eleven, I imagine that I see a man across the street in the darkness, watching the house, a very tall man who could be black, although the shadows make it hard to tell: Foreman? Perhaps a hallucination, because, when I look again, he is gone. Half an hour later, a pickup truck jolts down the street, and I fantasize a detailed story of surveillance, alternating vehicles, legions of watchers.

Silly, of course, but I really did get beaten up a few nights ago, and somebody really did call and tell me not to worry, that everything was taken care of.

So stop worrying!

I have tried to talk to Kimmer about what has been happening, but she still refuses to listen beyond wanting to make sure I really believe we are all safe. I cannot seem to breach the wall that has arisen between us. It is as though, by being assaulted, I have become hard evidence of what my wife, still hoping for judicial office, prefers to pretend is not true: that something is going on, and that dropping it, letting it die, is no longer an option.

I shake my head. I log on to the Internet Chess Club and play four quick games with somebody from Denmark, losing three. And still I have the sense, with me now for weeks, that my efforts to reason my way through are like chewing on cotton: I chomp and chomp and chomp, but I make no progress.

Sleep is suddenly very attractive.

I hurry upstairs and look in on Bentley, whose bedroom is decorated principally with various Disneyesque images of Hercules, who was, it seems, a smiling blond Aryan with the world’s largest teeth.
Herkes
is our son’s word for his favorite hero. I adjust his Herkes blankets by the light of the streetlamp, check his Herkes nightlight, kiss his warm forehead, and then head down the hall to join my slumbering wife in the master bedroom at the back of the house. I undress in the bathroom, remembering with some pain the days when Kimmer and I used to leave each other little notes, and sometimes a flower, atop the vanity; WAKE ME, we would write in amorous invitation. I do not remember when we stopped, but I do know that Kimmer ignored my notes for several weeks before I realized that she wasn’t leaving them any more. I
wonder whether my father, in his last years, had anybody to leave him a flower or a note at bedtime, and it occurs to me that I know nothing of his romantic life, if he even had one after my mother died. Alma implied that the Judge was lonely, and, looking back, I can see that he probably was. Now and then he would show up at an important dinner or theater opening, some famous conservative woman on his arm, invariably a citizen of the paler nation, but he always managed to convey the impression that these were mutually useful escortings, nothing romantic or sexual. I am aware of no girlfriend: if he had one, he kept her well hidden.

I decide that I do not want to know.

The notes: nowadays, Kimmer leaves on my pillow only articles torn from popular magazines, offering assistance in dealing with the death of a loved one, for she believes I have grieved insufficiently, or perhaps incorrectly. There is no serious scientific evidence that grieving in fact possesses the famous five stages, but an entire industry of counselors makes a fortune insisting that it is so.

“Go to bed,” I remind myself, lest I forget why I came upstairs.

I glance out the bathroom window into the yard. All seems to be at peace. At last I return to the bedroom and crawl between the sheets.
I am so, so sorry,
I whisper to my sleeping wife, but only in my mind.
I didn’t mean it to go this way.
I lie still, I say my prayers, and then I gaze at the ceiling in the darkness, sensing more than feeling my wife a few feet away, not daring to reach out to her for the comfort I crave to give, and to get. My mind refuses to settle into sleep, still besieging itself with all the guilt I can heap on my own head, which is quite a bit. I turn toward Kimmer again.
Where did you go for three hours this afternoon?
I ask her in my mind: for she was not at her office and did not answer her cell phone. It has happened before. It will happen again.
How did we get here, darling?

I try another position, but sleep refuses to come, and the answers I crave remain as elusive as ever. I am doing little work. My reputation is crumbling around me. I am becoming known as the mad law professor who skips classes, makes nutty accusations, and gets beaten up in the middle of the Quad.

And no human being, certainly no wife, to comfort me in my depression and distress.

Ah, Kimmer, Kimmer! Why do you do . . . what you do? Again I remember, uneasily, our relationship in its youth, when opening my
eyes each morning to Kimmer’s smiling face was all I asked of the world. I hear the rumbling of a train passing, but it is only the blood pounding in my head. I open my eyes, but my wife’s face is hidden. The bed is suddenly too vast, the distance from Kimmer too great. I turn onto one side, then the other, then back again, as my wife rolls over and mumbles something unintelligible. I wish I could believe she was telling me, in her half-sleep, that she loves me. I wish I dared reach out to her for comfort. I wish I knew why I have the sense that I have been played for a fool by forces larger than myself.

You and your family are perfectly safe.

Well, he said nothing about humiliation or the ruin of my career.

Longing for my wife’s unyielding body, I know the despair of the stateless refugee, praying that he might, against all expectations, reach once more his war-torn home, a cold, unfriendly territory from which he has been excluded. But out there in the darkness, I sense the forbidding barricades I cannot see. When one of my feet touches one of hers, Kimmer stirs and shifts her leg away, even in sleep rejecting my presence. For a long moment, I consider waking her, to argue my way back to my homeland, or perhaps to beg. Instead, I turn away from the border of the lush and sensuous land that once welcomed me, close my eyes, and hope not to dream.

CHAPTER 31
BROWN WEEK

(I)

“T
HAT’S AN INTERESTING STORY
,” says John Brown.

“It’s not a
story.
”

“It’s still interesting.” He sets himself in the middle of the driveway, shoots the basketball, misses badly. I grab the rebound, dribble to the edge of the grass, try a jumper.

Swish. I point my finger at him. He laughs and slaps it away, then high-fives me.

It is Friday afternoon, three days after Christmas, although Kimmer sometimes insists on celebrating Kwanzaa, too. Two nights ago it snowed three inches, but the unpredictable Elm Harbor weather has once again turned fair, warm enough for this Saturday barbecue. The slushy remainder of the storm splashes and runs under our feet. Not quite a white Christmas, but we didn’t miss it by much.

The Christmases of my childhood were grand and joyous affairs, the Shepard Street house decorated by my mother with freshly cut garlands and poinsettias and mistletoe, a tree of intimidating size glowing in the two-story foyer, the downstairs full of boisterous relatives and friends, with more reciprocal visits to come in the days to follow. We children dozed through midnight mass at Trinity and St. Michael and rose early the next morning to find the gigantic tree surrounded, as if through wizardry, by a small mountain of gifts. Even though we knew the greater part of the festively wrapped packages would turn out to hold clothing and books, we always imagined them full of beautiful toys, which some of them were. And the Judge—in those early days, merely Daddy—would sit in his favorite armchair in slippers and robe, the pipe he smoked back then held fast between his teeth,
relishing our love and gratitude, rubbing our backs as we hugged his strong legs.

At Number 41 Hobby Road, Christmas has always been a more staid affair, as Kimmer and I exchange token gifts in front of the small artificial tree on which my practical wife insists, pointing to the time, trouble, and what she calls the risk—
Water and electricity together? Forget it!
—of the real thing. With Bentley, at three years and nine months, old enough to appreciate what is going on (although it is Santa, not Jesus, he seems to appreciate), Kimmer and I both tried to be a little more upbeat this year. Wrapping our son’s gifts together on Christmas Eve was actually a joy, and, in bed later on, as we lay awake listening to the wind, my wife kissed my cheek and told me she is glad we are still together. I told her I am glad, too, which is the truth. I have worked hard over the past couple of weeks to keep my promise to Morris Young by treating my wife to love rather than suspicion, and she has responded with a lighter, happier mood. I have the unexpected but reassuring sense that whatever man she was involved with she has put behind her, perhaps as a New Year’s resolution, or even a Christmas gift to her husband. At the same time, belowdecks, I have tried to think of a way to move forward on cleaning up the mess into which the Judge has drawn me.

Telling John Brown a little of what has been going on, as I promised last month I would, seems to me a sensible start.

“So, what do you think I should do?” I ask John as I shoot again. The ball clangs off the rim and crashes down on his dark blue Town & Country minivan. He scoops up the ball before it has the chance to knock over my rusty but trusty grill, where orange flames frolic over freshly lighted charcoal.

“Nothing. Leave it to the FBI. There’s nothing to be done. Interesting shot.” As laconic as always. John does not believe in using two words when one will do, and will never substitute three syllables when two are sufficient. We have been shooting hoops so that we can talk without fear of interruption. John has been urging me to tell the authorities about everything, but I have not committed myself to anything. “You need an expert, Misha. And they’re the experts.”

I nod thoughtfully. I am not the sort of man who easily befriends other men, but my relationship with John has been an oddly enduring thing. I have known him and his wife, Janice, since we were all college freshmen together, Janice the most sought-after among the black
women in the class, John easily the most studious of the black men. Today John is an electrical engineer, which is what he always planned, and Janice is a full-time mother, which is what she always wanted. Now that he is at Ohio State, they live in Columbus, we see them only once or twice a year, usually just after classes end for the holiday. They are wonderful people. Kimmer likes them, too:
Even though you brought them into the marriage,
she likes to quip.

“I don’t know,” I say finally, the Hamlet of Hobby Road.