The Emperor of Ocean Park Read online

“The gun. It is still unregistered and unlicensed. Nobody can legally possess it. It has to be turned in.”

  “Oh.” Lemaster Carlyle is a person of sufficient integrity that I suspect this would be his advice even had he not spent three years as an Assistant United States Attorney before turning to the academic world. I watch him pick at his shrimp salad. He never seems to eat very much, never seems to gain an ounce of weight. His suits always fit perfectly. He is a small man with a huge mind, a few years older than I, a Harvard Law School graduate who was also in his day a divinity student before joining our ranks. His smooth, lean face, at once playful and wise, is a rich West Indian purple-black. His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself. They live in one of our tonier suburbs with their four perfect children. He stands miles above me in the school’s unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician. Although he calls himself a progressive, Lem has voted Republican the last few elections, citing the Democratic Party’s opposition to school vouchers, which he sees as the only hope for the children of the inner city. He was cofounder and, for all I know, sole member of a forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush. His pithy, closely reasoned op-eds dot the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. He seems to be on television every five minutes. He is also said to be restless. Many of our colleagues are begging him to wait patiently to succeed Lynda Wyatt, becoming our first black dean, but the rumor mill reports that Lem has grown as bored with the academy as he has with most things he has conquered, and will soon be leaving us for a full-time position at one of the television networks. At the Judge’s funeral, people made a great fuss over him. I often wish I could like Lemaster more, and envy him less.

  “And if the person who found the gun didn’t turn it in?” I press.

  He sips his water—nobody claims ever to have seen him drink anything else—and shakes his slender head. His small eyes smile at me above a thin mustache. “Finding it is not a crime. Possessing it is a crime.”

  So I will advise my sister to turn it in. Case closed.

  Except that Lemaster Carlyle levers it back open. “This relative of yours, Talcott—do you know why he thought he needed a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Most people buy them for self-protection, even people who buy them illegally. But some of course are purchased in order to commit crimes.”

  “Okay.”

  He dabs at his lips with the paper napkin, then folds it carefully before depositing it on the table, next to his plate. He has eaten perhaps four bites. “If it were a relative of mine, I would not be interested in where he got the gun, or what could happen to me for possessing it. I would be interested in learning why he bought it in the first place.”

  (II)

  BACK INSIDE OLDIE, heading for the central staircase, I pretend to myself for a silly moment that I want to put all of this behind me. But I am no longer chasing the truth; the truth seems to be chasing me. Why did my father want a gun? To protect himself or to commit a crime, Lemaster Carlyle suggested. Neither one is happy news. What was my father involved in? I think of Jack Ziegler in the cemetery. I think of McDermott-Scott, deemed harmless by his local sheriff, but dead nevertheless, the circumstances suspicious. My shoulders sag. Kimmer’s judgeship seems miles and miles distant. I am struck by a sudden urge to rush upstairs to visit Theo Mountain, for I need to be cheered up, but I have to avoid making my onetime mentor my full-time crutch.

  I pass a knot of students: Crysta Smallwood arguing heatedly with several other women of color, as they nowadays style themselves. A few words float outward from their confab: dialectical interstices and outsider position and reconstructed other. I long for the days when students argued over the rules of civil procedure or the statute of limitations, back when the nation’s leading law schools thought their job was teaching law.

  Nearing my office, I notice Arnold Rosen, one of the faculty’s great liberal hard-liners, gliding toward me in his powered wheelchair. He smiles his thin, superior smile, and I smile back reluctantly, for we are not close. I admire Arnie’s mind and his determination to stick to his principles, but I am not sure that he admires anything in me, especially given that I am the son of the great conservative hero. Arnie came to us from Harvard about a decade ago, Stuart Land’s masterful recruiting coup, and is said to be Lem Carlyle’s only competitor to succeed Dean Lynda when she one day steps down.

  A flick of his finger on a control rod slows the chair. His pale eyes are distant and judgmental as he looks up at me. “Good afternoon, Talcott.”

  “Hi, Arnie.” My key is in my hand, signaling, I hope, that I do not really feel much like talking just now.

  “I don’t think I’ve had the chance to tell you how sorry I am about your father.”

  “Thank you,” I mutter, too tired to be annoyed by his hypocrisy. Arnie teaches legal ethics and a variety of commercial law courses and is a prodigious scholar, but saves his real enthusiasm for the three great causes of the contemporary left: abortion, gay rights, and a very strict separation of church and state. A few months ago, my former student Shirley Branch, the first black woman we have ever hired, gave a paper at the semi-weekly faculty lunch arguing that the form of separation we intellectuals today take for granted is too strict, that its application would have harmed, for example, the civil rights movement. Arnie disagreed, suggesting that Shirley’s notion would lead us back to the days of America as a Christian nation. The two of them went at it quite heatedly, until Rob Saltpeter, the moderator, defused the situation with a wry observation: The trouble with America is not that it is a Christian nation but that too often it isn’t.

  Rob, like Lem, has style.

  “You know, Talcott,” Arnie murmurs, smiling up at me, “one of our colleagues came to talk to me about you the other day.”

  “About me? What about me?”

  “Well, it was peculiar. He thought you might have violated a rule of ethics. I set him straight, I assure you.”

  I sway on my feet. “What rule? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re doing some consulting work for a corporation. Something to do with toxic torts, correct?”

  “Uh . . . yes. Yes, I am. So?”

  “Well, our colleague asked me if it was proper for you to continue to write in the area when you were getting paid as an advocate to take a particular view.”

  “What!”

  “You see the problem, I’m sure. Legal scholarship is supposed to be objective. That’s our myth and we cling to it. We have to, or we’re in the wrong business. That’s why the school frowns on professors’ doing too much consulting work.”

  “I understand that, but—”

  Arnie circles his chair backward an inch or two, waves a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry, Talcott. It’s a common misconception. There is no rule against it—there aren’t really any ethical rules about legal scholarship—and, besides—”

  “And, besides, I would never slant my scholarship for the sake of a fee!”

  “Well, that’s what I said, too.” Nodding his head. “But our colleague seemed pretty sure. I have the impression we haven’t heard the end of this.”

  I make a small sound. Disbelief, maybe, or simply anger. Is this more of the pressure Stuart mentioned?

  “Arnie, listen. Who was it that came to you? Who brought this up?”

  His hand flaps again. “Ah, Talcott, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

  “You can’t? Why not?”

  “Attorney-client privilege.” Still smiling, he sails off down the hall.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE HALLS OF JUSTICE

  (I)

  “MISHA, it is so good to see you.” A hug, because I am a man and he is a man. Male judges nowadays are afraid to hug their female clerks, or so my father used to say. But some of his facts he made up. “Come in, come in.”

  Wallace Warrenton Wainwright steps to one
side, beckoning me to join him in his inner office. The chubby black messenger who walked me in from the clerk’s office has vanished. As the door to the anteroom closes, it is just me and Wallace Wainwright. He is a tall man, at least five inches over six feet, with shoulders more thick than muscular, thinning brown-white hair, and a pale, studied asceticism about his friendly face. He seems too happy to be as smart as he is. He looks less like a judge than a friar—Franciscan, to be sure—and if you sat next to him on an airplane, you would never take Wallace Wainwright for an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But that is how history will record him. Outside this spacious room, computers buzz and bleep, printers zip, law clerks rush about, telephones softly burr—the sounds, as Justice Wainwright would surely describe the tumult, of justice being done. And maybe, from time to time, the Court has done justice, but a good deal less than most people seem to assume, for it has been, for most of its history, a follower, not an agent, of change. We law professors like to speak and write as though the past is otherwise, as though the Justices have lately abandoned a traditional role of protecting the weak against the strong.

  We speak and write nonsense.

  Like every other social institution, the Court has mainly been the ally of the insiders, a proposition that should come as no surprise, because only the insiders become the Presidents who nominate the Justices, the Senators who confirm them—or the candidates from whom the nominees are chosen in the first place. Liberals point to Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade as though they have identified the Court’s appropriate role in the nation’s governance, whereas all they have really identified is a peculiar epoch in history, during which the Justices set about trying to change America rather than trying to keep it the same. The epoch died, and the Court swiftly faded as an engine of social evolution, which probably would have made the Framers of the Constitution very happy. After all, Madison and Hamilton were insiders too.

  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)

  “IT’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.”