The Emperor of Ocean Park (6 page)

Mariah, naturally, made more of all this than I did. I have always thought that the far left and far right need each other, desperately, for if either one were to vanish the other would lose its reason to exist, a conviction that has freshened in me from year to year, as each grows ever more vehement in its search for somebody to hate. Now and then, I even wondered aloud to Kimmer—I would say it to no one else—whether my father manufactured half his political views in order to keep his face on television, his enemies at his heels, and his speaking fees in the range of half a million dollars a year. But Mariah, having been in her time both philosophy major and investigative journalist, sees oppositions as real; the Judge and his enemies, she would say, were playing out the great ideological debates of the era. It was the culture war, she would insist, that brought him down. I thought this proposition quite silly, and came to think, after years of reading about it, that the scandal-mongers who drove him from the bench might have had a point; and I made the mistake of saying this, too, on the telephone to
Mariah, not long after Bob Woodward published his best-selling book about the case. The book, I told her, was pretty convincing: the Judge was not a victim but a perjurer.

Aghast at this unexpected break in the family ranks, even in private, Mariah swore in my presence for what I am fairly certain was the first time in our mutual lives. I asked her whether she had actually read the book, and she responded that she had no time for such trash, although
trash
was not the word she actually selected. She had called, you should understand, because she wanted the entire family—that is, the three children—to write a joint letter to the
Times
as a protest against its favorable review of the Woodward book. She still had friends there who would see that it was published, she said. I declined and told her why. She told me that I had to do it, that it was my duty. I mumbled something about letting sleeping dogs lie. She told me that I never did anything she wanted me to do, dredging up a story I myself had forgotten about some lonely friend of hers she begged me to ask out when I was in college. Mariah said I should, just once, stand up for her. She said she had never done anything to deserve being treated the way I treated her. I thought about my Willie Mays baseball card, but decided not to mention it. Instead, a bit irritated, I am afraid I called her immature—no, tell the truth, the term I used was
spoiled brat
—and Mariah, after a heavy pause, answered with what I considered an unprovoked assault on my wife, which began, “Speaking of lying down with bratty dogs, how’s your bitch?” My sister can play the dozens with anybody, and certainly with me, having honed her skills during her long and passionate membership in a rather exclusive and notoriously catty black sorority. When I suggested huffily that it was inappropriate for her to talk about Kimmer in those terms—very well, I put it a bit more strongly than that—Mariah asked angrily whether I ever raised the same objection to the things she knew my wife said about her. As I floundered in search of an answer, she added that blood was thicker than water, that this was something I owed to the family. And when I tried to climb up on my pedagogical high horse, proposing that my higher duty was to truth, she asked me why in that case I didn’t just take out a full-page ad in the paper: MY FATHER IS GUILTY AND MY WIFE IS UNFAITHFUL. But that is how badly we always get along. So, when Mariah pulls me aside in the grim family-filled foyer at Shepard Street and whispers that she has to talk to me later on in private, I assume she wants to discuss the remaining details of the funeral, for what else have we two lifelong enemies
left to talk about? But I am wrong: what my sister wants to tell me is the name of the man who murdered our father.

(II)

I
LAUGH
when Mariah tells me. I confess it freely, if guiltily. It is terrible of me, but I do it anyway. Perhaps it is a matter of exhaustion. We have no time together until after midnight, when we at last sit down at the kitchen table drinking hot cocoa, me still in my tie, my sister, fresh from the shower, in a fluffy blue robe. Howard and the children and some subset of the numberless cousins are asleep, crammed into various corners of the grand old house. The kitchen, which my father recently had redone, is sparkling white; the counters, the appliances, the walls, the curtains, the table, everything the same sheeny white. At night, with all the lights on, the reflections hurt my eyes, lending an air of insanity to what is already surreal.

“What exactly are you laughing at?” Mariah demands, rearing back from the table. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You think
Jack Ziegler
killed Dad?” I splutter, still not quite able to get my mind around it. “Uncle Jack? What for?”

“You know what for! And don’t call him Uncle Jack!”

I shake my head, trying to be gentle, wishing Addison would arrive after all, because he is far more patient with Mariah than I will ever be. A moment ago, before uttering the name, my sister was nervous, maybe even frightened. Now she is furious. So I guess you could say I have at least improved her mood.

“No, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t even know what makes you think somebody killed him. He had a heart attack, remember?”

“Why would he suddenly have a heart attack now?”

“That’s how they are. They’re sudden.” My impatience is making me cruel, and I try to force myself to slow down. My sister is no fool, often discerning things that others miss. Mariah was the subject of a small piece in
Ebony
magazine back in the mid-1980s, when, as a twenty-six-year-old reporter at the
New York Times,
she achieved a Pulitzer nomination for a series of stories about the diverse lives of children who eat in soup kitchens. But she suddenly quit her job not long after, when the paper began investigating my father in earnest. Although Mariah called it a protest, the truth is that she left the workforce entirely and,
together with her very new husband, moved to a lovely old colonial in Darien—the first of three, each larger than the last—promising to devote all her time to her children, and in this way endeared herself to our mother, who believed to the day she died that women belong in the home. Darien is not that far from Elm Harbor, but these days Mariah and I see each other twice a year, if unlucky. It is not so much that we do not love each other, I think, as that we do not quite like each other. I resolve, for perhaps the hundredth time, to do better by my sister. “Besides,” I add, softly, “he wasn’t exactly young.”

“Seventy isn’t old. Not any more.”

“Still, he did have a heart attack. The hospital said so.”

“Oh, Tal,” she sighs, flapping a hand at me and feigning world-weariness, “there are so many drugs that can cause heart attacks. I used to work the police beat, remember? This is my area. And it’s really hard to catch this stuff in the autopsy. I mean, you are really so innocent.”

I decide to give that one a miss, especially since Kimmer is constantly saying the same thing about me, for different reasons. I offer an olive branch: “Okay, okay. So why would Uncle Jack want to kill him?”

“To shut him up,” she says heavily, then stops and draws in her breath so suddenly that I cast a quick look over my shoulder, to see whether Jack Ziegler, the family bogeyman, might be peering in the window. I see only my mother’s collection of crystal paperweights, gathered from countries all over the world, lined up on the sill like shiny eggs with transparent shells, and, in the glass of the window, my own reflection mocking me: an exhausted, sagging Talcott Garland, looking less like a law professor in his unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair and crooked tie than like a child wishing it would all be over. I turn back to look at my sister. Like Mallory Corcoran, our “Uncle Mal,” the man we call Uncle Jack is not related to us by blood or marriage. The family bestowed upon these white friends of my father honorary titles when they became godparents—Uncle Mal to Mariah, Uncle Jack to Abby—but, unlike Uncle Mal, Jack Ziegler had far more to do with my father’s destruction than with his redemption.

“Shut him up about what?” I ask softly, because it has always been Mariah’s position that my father knew nothing about Uncle Jack’s more questionable activities, that the suggestion of any business connection between the two of them was no more than a white-liberal plot against a brilliant and therefore dangerous black conservative. Maybe that is why Mariah stops: she sees the trap into which her own reasoning leads.

“I don’t know,” she mutters, looking down and clutching her mug with a mother’s fierce protectiveness.

This might be a good moment to let my sister’s fantasy drop, but, having listened this far, I decide that it is my duty to help her see how nutty an idea it is. “Then what makes you think Uncle Jack had anything to do with it?”

“Ever since the hearings, he’s been waiting for the right moment. You know he has, Tal. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it!”

I ask a lawyer’s question. “What would make this the right moment?”

“I don’t know, Tal. But I know I’m right.”

Again: “Do we have any actual evidence?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet. But you could help me, Tal. You’re a lawyer, I’m . . . I used to be a journalist. We could, you know, investigate it together. Look for proof.”

I frown slightly. Mariah has always been both spontaneous and obsessive, and talking her out of her latest impulse will not be easy. “Well, we would need a reason first.”

“Jack Ziegler is a murderer. How’s that for a reason?”

“Even assuming that’s true . . .”

“It’s not an
assumption.”
Her eyes flash with fresh fury. “How can you defend a man like that?”

“I’m not defending anyone.” I do not want to pick a fight, so I answer her challenge with another: “So, do you have a plan in mind? Do you want to call Uncle Mal?”

Mariah is trapped and she knows it. She does not really want an investigation, and knows as well as I do that nothing would change, that the heart attack would still be a heart attack, that she would be made to look a fool. She cannot call Mallory Corcoran, one of the most powerful lawyers in the city, and demand, on nothing but hope, that he shake up the world for her. Mariah refuses to look at me, scowling instead in the direction of the gleaming white SubZero refrigerator, already decorated, through some domestic alchemy, with the inevitable pictures of dogs and trees and ships, crudely drawn in crayon by her younger children—the sort of sentimental bric-a-brac that the Judge would never have tolerated.

“I don’t know,” Mariah mumbles, the lines of exhaustion plain on her stubborn face.

“Well, if—”

“I don’t know what to do.” She shakes her head slowly, her gaze on
the white table between us. And this tiny chink in Mariah’s emotional armor offers me a bright, sad insight into the life she leads all day as Howard rides off to far provinces to slay financial dragons for the clients, and the profits, of Goldman Sachs. The pictures on the refrigerator are the fruits of my sister’s frantic efforts yesterday to keep her children busy as she went about the debilitating business of planning, virtually alone, a funeral service for the father she spent four decades trying unsuccessfully to please.

“I’m so tired,” Mariah declares, a rare admission of weakness. I look away for a moment, not wanting her to see how these three simple words have touched me, not even wanting to acknowledge the commonality. The truth is that Mariah and Addison and I always seem to be exhausted. The scandal that destroyed our father’s career somehow energized him for a new one but left his family debilitated. We children have never quite recovered.

“You’ve been working hard.”

“Don’t patronize me, Tal.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but her eyes flash again, and I know she has been offended by a nuance that was not even there. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I am, but . . .”

“Take me seriously!”

My sister is practicing her best glare. The weariness is gone. The confusion is gone. I remember reading in college that social psychologists believe anger is functional, that it builds self-confidence and even creativity. Well, I don’t know about the creative part, but Mariah, angry at me as usual, is suddenly as confident as ever.

“Okay,” I offer, “okay, I’m sorry.” My sister waits, giving nothing. She wants me to make the move, saying something to show that I am taking her crazy idea seriously. So I formulate a serious question:

“What can I do to help?” Leaving open the matter of what exactly I am offering to help with.

Mariah shakes her head, starts to speak, then shrugs. To my surprise, tears begin a slow course down her cheeks.

“Hey,” I say. I almost reach out to brush them away, then remember the foyer and decide to sit still. “Hey, kid, it’s okay. It is.”

“No, it isn’t okay,” Mariah sobs, making a fist with her dainty hand and striking the table with considerable force. “I don’t think . . . I don’t think it will ever be okay.”

“I miss him too,” I say, which is quite possibly a lie, but is also, I hope, the right thing to say.

Crying openly now, Mariah buries her face in her hands, still shaking her head. And still I dare not touch her.

“It’s okay,” I say again.

My sister lifts her head. In her grief and despair, she has attained a truly haunting beauty, as though pain has freed her from mere mortal concerns.

“Jack Ziegler is a monster,” she says shortly. Well, that at least is true, even if only a fraction of the wicked things the papers say about him ever happened. But it is also true that he has been tried and acquitted at least three times, including once for murder, and, as far as I know, continues to live up in Aspen, Colorado, fabulously wealthy and as safe from the world’s law-enforcement authorities as the Constitution of the United States can make him.

“Mariah,” I say, still softly, “I don’t think anybody in the family has seen Uncle Jack in more than ten years. Not since . . . well, you know.”

“That’s not true,” she says tonelessly. “Daddy saw him last week. They had dinner.”