The Emperor of Ocean Park (64 page)

“I’m sorry, Misha.” My wife is her old, cold self again, suspicious of everyone and everything. “It’s just that I have the feeling I’m being set up.”

I try to keep it light. “This would be an awful lot of trouble to go to just to set you up, darling.”

A silence while she thinks this over. “I guess you’re right,” she grudges. “But I gotta tell you, honey, it sounds awfully weird.”

It is only after I glumly hang up the phone and return to my unfinished galley proofs that I realize Kimmer may be half right. It does look like a setup. But my wife is not the one being set up.

(III)

“S
URE I KNEW ABOUT IT
,” Theophilus Mountain tells me, a broad smile materializing from some unexpected valley in his acres of beard. “You think I wouldn’t have noticed?”

As usual after arguing with my wife, I am feeling logy, my head filled with fuzz rather than thought. I do not quite get Theo’s point.

“You knew Marc copied Chapter Three from . . . from your brother? You knew it all these years? And you didn’t do anything about it?”

Theo laughs, shifting his round body in his wooden desk chair. He is delighted to be present at the rout of Marc Hadley, one of his many enemies. Most of those Theo despises he hates for their politics; Stuart Land, for example. But the ambitious Marc Hadley carefully cultivates the image of a scholar not driven by politics; Marc he hates for his arrogance. From the day he arrived in Elm Harbor a quarter century ago to teach constitutional law, Marc Hadley has never kowtowed to Theophilus Mountain in the way that the youngsters in his field used to do . . . and the way nobody does any longer. Nowadays, they kowtow to Marc Hadley instead. Theo has never forgiven Marc for changing the rules.

“I never saw the point,” says Theo. He begins to pace his huge office, located all the way at the end of the second floor, overlooking the main entrance of Oldie. Theo Mountain, say the wits, watches the new faculty come in the door and watches the old ones get carried out; but Theo himself seems eternal. The office he inhabits is eternal, too, a law school legend, an incredible mess, featuring stacks of papers halfway to the ceiling, covering just about every surface. My office is cluttered, true, as many around the building are, but Theo’s is awesome, a masterpiece, a monument to a true genius of disorganization. The only way to sit down is to move some of the junk aside. Theo never seems to care where you put what you move or which stacks you knock over in the process of emptying a chair; he never throws anything away but never looks at anything he keeps. It is said that he has copies of
every faculty memo going back to the dawn of the twentieth century. Sometimes I think he might.

“I never saw the point,” he repeats, striding over to his file cabinet and yanking open drawers in apparently random order. “Marc was younger then, and a bigger idiot than he is now, and he was convinced, the way you all are when you first arrive, that he knew pretty much everything there was to know. So one day we had lunch and talked about Cardozo. And it turned out he didn’t know much about Cardozo at all.” Theo has found something to fascinate him in the back of one of the drawers. He leans over and pokes his head in, just like a cartoon character, and I half expect his upper body to disappear, with his feet tumbling in just behind.

“Do you need any help?”

“Are you kidding?” He is among the living again, a thick manila folder clutched in his meaty hands. His laugh makes his beard flutter. “So, anyway,” he resumes, “I told him about this paper my brother had written, arguing, um, that Cardozo’s judicial method was really the model for just about all the important constitutional adjudication since the 1940s.”

“Marc’s theory,” I murmur.

“Perry’s
theory,” Theo corrects me with gentle good humor. “Marc asked me if he could see a copy of the paper. Well, my brother was never one for sharing his papers, except with me and Hero, of course. So it wouldn’t have done any good to ask Perry. But I liked Marc, I thought he had some promise, and I loaned him my copy.” He spins the folder across his desktop in my direction, and, even before I open it, I know I am holding in my hand the evidence of Marc Hadley’s plagiarism: Pericles Mountain’s unpublished manuscript on Cardozo, the uncited source for the third chapter of Marc’s book, the single great idea for which he won every prize the legal academy can offer.

I flip through the yellowed pages. I see occasional notes in Theo’s hand, cross-outs, question marks, inserts, coffee stains. “Are you sure . . .”

“That Marc copied it? Sure I am. You read it, you’ll see for yourself.”

“And you knew at the time? When his book came out?”

“Sure did.”

I ask Kimmer’s question: “So why didn’t you do something about it?”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . go public.”

Theo frowns briefly, as though he does not know the answer himself. Except that he does. I can read it in his cautious, calculating eyes. Theo has seen it all, yet life never seems to bore him. When he smiles again, his look is so devious it scares me. “Well, I wouldn’t say I did
nothing
exactly.”

“What
would
you say you did?”

“I would say I told
Marc.
”

“Why would you just tell Marc and not tell anybody . . .” I begin. Then I stop. I see it. Oh, this is so Theo! Of course he told Marc! He told Marc so that he would have the plagiarism to hold over the head of his young, arrogant colleague for the next couple of decades. He told nobody else because he wanted Marc beholden to him. And because, as I now realize, Theo, my onetime mentor, is the kind of secret, envious hater who would prefer to own the knowledge of Marc’s perfidy, rather than sharing it with the world. If everybody else realized that the great Marc Hadley was a liar and a cheat, that would actually have reduced rather than enhanced Theo’s pleasure.

Besides, by keeping the secret to himself, he could wait until this perfectly delicious moment to tip over Marc Hadley’s house of cards. If, indeed, he was involved in the tipping.

“I didn’t want Marc to get in trouble,” says Theo in the pious tone of a man who has never despised a colleague in his life. His brother’s memory, it seems, mattered to Theo not a smidgen; what he cared about was making Marc suffer. “But I wanted him to know that ideas are not all that easy to disguise. I wanted him to know that I knew. I wanted him not to do it again. And, well, you know what happened, I suppose. Everybody knows.”

I do not see it. Then I do. “His writer’s block.”

“Exactly.” Theo almost cackles with glee. “I guess I scared him into never writing another book.”

Or ordered him not to, so that his arrogant colleague would have to suffer years of listening to people mutter about his wasted potential.

“Why would you do something like that?” The words jump out of me.

“People like Marc Hadley deserve what they get.”

“But why would he imagine he could get away with it?”

“Marc thought he was clever. He asked me, maybe half a year after Perry died, if I remembered his paper on Cardozo. I told him I didn’t remember a word of it, that I never even read it.” Theo’s merry eyes twinkle. “That was a lie.”

I am ready to go. I have had enough of Theo. I suspected his capacity for hate, but never imagined this streak of cruelty. Poor Marc is finished as a judicial nominee: that is the one nugget of actual news in this stream of reminiscence. Dana’s story is right on the money. The allegation of plagiarism is not survivable in today’s climate, even if it turns out not to be true—and, not having read Perry Mountain’s manuscript, I warn myself cautiously, I have no way to be sure. The whole tale could turn out to be fiction. Or a misunderstanding. But I doubt it. The lines of worry in Dahlia Hadley’s face that afternoon at the preschool were too stark; when she said something was eating away at her husband, she spoke the simple truth. Marc was not worried about people discovering that his daughter was sleeping with Lionel Eldridge; he was worried about his own terrible error of two decades back. Sitting in Theo Mountain’s paper-strewn office, I find myself growing lightheaded. Marc is out. Kimmer is in. The President wants quality and diversity, according to Ruthie Silverman, and my wife brings both: unless something pops up in her background check, my wife is going to become a federal judge.

And maybe our marriage will be saved, despite my late father’s machinations.

I hand back Theo’s battered old folder and thank him for his time. Theo snatches it from my hand and buries it afresh in his file cabinet, although not in the same drawer from which he initially pulled it.

At the door, another thought strikes me.

“Theo, don’t you think it’s awfully convenient, all of this coming up at just the right moment to knock Marc out of the box?”

“Yes, I do.” A smile of reminiscence. “I’m reminded of what Mr. Justice Frankfurter supposedly said when he heard the news of Mr. Chief Justice Vinson’s death just before the reargument of
Brown v. Board of Education
in the Supreme Court: ‘This is the first indication that I have ever had that there is a God.’”

Theo chortles madly. I wait until he settles down and then ask the other question that is burning in my mind: “Theo, you wouldn’t happen to know how the news really got out, would you? I mean, about the . . . alleged plagiarism.”

“Believe me, Talcott, it’s genuine plagiarism.” He smiles at his own turn of a phrase. “What, you think I let the cat out of the bag? Well, you’re wrong. From what I hear, it was a student at UCLA. I told you.”

“But do you believe that story?”

Theo is finally exasperated. “Tal, come on. Sometimes you get
actual, genuine good news. Try to appreciate those moments. They don’t come often.”

“I suppose not,” I murmur, shaking his hand as I go, because Theo is of the generation that appreciates such niceties. But my mind is not in this office, or even in this building. My thoughts are back at the cemetery on the day we buried my father, when a sickly old man named Jack Ziegler told me to tell Kimmer not to worry about Marc Hadley.
I do not think he has the staying power.
Weren’t those the words?
A fairly large skeleton is rattling around in his closet. Sooner or later, it is bound to tumble out.

I’ll say.

CHAPTER 36
A BROTHERS TALE

(I)

I
FINALLY REACH
A
DDISON
on the quiet Sunday afternoon before classes resume. I have been calling him, on and off, since Mariah’s visit, and tried him on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. I have left messages on his machine at home and with his producer at the studio. I have tried his cell phone. I have sent e-mail. I have received, in response, nothing. In a fearful burst of inspiration, I even tracked down Beth Olin, the poet, who turns out to live in Jamestown, New York, but when she heard who I was and what I wanted she hung up on me, which answered the question of whether they are still together. I even thought of calling one of his ex-wives, but my boldness has its limits.

“I’ve been away,” he tells me now, as I sit in my study eating a tuna sandwich and watching a fresh flurry of midwinter snow blowing around the street. Another four to six inches are forecast, but Kimmer went to the office anyway. Addison sounds exhausted. “Sorry.”

“Away where your cell phone doesn’t work?” I ask peevishly.

“Argentina.”

“Argentina?”

“I never told you? I was looking at land. I’ve been there, I don’t know, seven or eight times in the past two years. I’m thinking I might build a house down there.” To live in until the Democrats are back in the White House, maybe. “And I had such a good time I thought I’d stay a few days. The days became weeks and . . . well, anyway, I’m back.”

Days became weeks?

“So—what did you do? Took time off from the show?”

“The show is getting a little old, to tell you the truth. I think it’s time for me to get back to work on the book.” Addison says something like
this every few years, but all it ever means is that he is about to change jobs. Nobody I know has ever actually seen him write a line.

“That would be great,” I offer loyally. “To do the book, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a history that needs to be written.”

“Yeah.” It isn’t just exhaustion that is depressing my brother’s voice, I realize. There is a sense of resignation. I wonder what it is to which he is resigned. “Hey, guess what, bro? The FBI was out talking to me. About
your wife.”
A small chuckle. “Like, sure, I know anything about her.”

“It’s her background check, Addison. They have to talk to everybody.”

“I know that. I just don’t know why
her
damn background check has to include so many questions about
my
damn money.” But I am sure Addison remembers, as I do, the embarrassingly cursory investigation of the Judge. Procedures, it is said, have been tightened since those days. “So, anyway, you left lots of messages. Must be something important.”

I have had plenty of time to think about how to handle this moment. I work around to the more urgent issue by starting with the lesser one.

So I tell my brother about Mariah’s visit and the missing report from Jonathan Villard. I explain that there is no copy to be found anywhere, including the police files, where Meadows drew a blank. I tell him about the two pages of notes in the Judge’s handwriting. All we can glean from the notes, I add, is that the car that killed Abby had two people in it.

“Huh,” is Addison’s only comment. Then he adds, surprised, “You guys have made a lot of progress,” and I know, at that moment, that I am right. My brother pauses again, but I wait him out. Finally, he asks the question that surely troubles him most: “So, why are you telling me this?”

“You know why,” I say softly. Waiting for his answer, I can hear the television in the family room, where Bentley is watching a squeakyclean video that John and Janice Brown, his godparents, gave him for Christmas. Two nights ago, Kimmer and I attended the annual post-holiday bash of Lemaster Carlyle’s fraternity, joining a couple of hundred other well-to-do members of the darker nation, dancing the electric slide, the cha-cha slide, and a brand-new invention known as the dot-com slide into the wee hours of the morning. Maybe we do have a bit of a social life after all.