PROLOGUE
THE VINEYARD HOUSE
When my father finally died, he left the Redskins tickets to my
brother, the house on Shepard Street to my sister, and the house on
the Vineyard to me. The football tickets, of course, were the most
valuable item in the estate, but then Addison was always the
biggest favorite and the biggest fan, the only one of the children
who came close to sharing my father''s obsession, as well as the
only one of us actually on speaking terms with my father the last
time he drew his will. Addison is a gem, if you don''t mind the
religious nonsense, but Mariah and I have not been close in the
years since I joined the enemy, as she puts it, which is why my
father bequeathed us houses four hundred miles apart.
I was glad to have the Vineyard house, a tidy little Victorian on
Ocean Park in the town of Oak Bluffs, with lots of frilly
carpenter''s Gothic along the sagging porch and a lovely morning
view of the white band shell set amidst a vast sea of smooth green
grass and outlined against a vaster sea of bright blue water. My
parents liked to tell how they bought the house for a song back in
the sixties, when Martha''s Vineyard, and the black middle-class
colony that summers there, were still smart and secret. Lately, in
my father''s oft-repeated view, the Vineyard had tumbled downhill,
for it was crowded and noisy and, besides, they let everyone in
now, by which he meant black people less well off than we. There
were too many new houses going up, he would moan, many of them
despoiling the roads and woods near the best beaches. There were
even condominiums, of all things, especially near Edgartown, which
he could not understand, because the southern part of the island is
what he always called Kennedy country, the land where rich white
vacationers and their bratty children congregate, and a part-angry,
part-jealous article of my father''s faith held that white people
allow the members of what he liked to call the darker nation to
swarm and crowd while keeping the open spaces for themselves.
And yet, amidst all the clamor, the Vineyard house is a small
marvel. I loved it as a child and love it more now. Every room,
every dark wooden stair, every window whispers its secret share of
memories. As a child, I broke an ankle and a wrist in a fall from
the gabled roof outside the master bedroom; now, more than thirty
years after, I no longer recall why I thought it would be fun to
climb there. Two summers later, as I wandered the house in
post-midnight darkness, searching for a drink of water, an odd
mewling sound dropped me into a crouch on the landing, whence, a
week or so shy of my tenth birthday, I peered through the
balustrade and thus caught my first stimulating glimpse of the
primal mystery of the adult world. I saw my brother, Addison, four
years older than I, tussling with our cousin Sally, a dark beauty
of fifteen, on the threadbare burgundy sofa opposite the television
down in the shadowy nook of the stairwell, neither of them quite
fully dressed, although I was somehow unable to figure out
precisely what articles of clothing were missing. My instinct was
to flee. Instead, seized by a weirdly thrilling lethargy, I watched
them roll about, their arms and legs intertwined in seemingly
random postures--making out, we called it in those simpler days, a
phrase pregnant with purposeful ambiguity, perhaps as a protection
against the burden of specificity.
My own teen years, like my adulthood dreary and overlong, brought
no similar adventures, least of all on the Vineyard; the highlight,
I suppose, came near the end of our last summer sojourn as a full
family, when I was about thirteen, and Mariah, a rather pudgy
fifteen and angry at me for some smart-mouthed crack about her
weight, borrowed a box of kitchen matches, then stole a Topps
Willie Mays baseball card that I treasured and climbed the
dangerous pull-down ladder to the attic, eight rickety wooden
slats, most of them loose. When I caught up with her, my sister
burned the card before my eyes as I wept helplessly, falling to my
knees in the wretched afternoon heat of the dusty, low-ceilinged
loft--the two of us already set in our lifelong pattern of
animosity. That same summer, my sister Abigail, in those days still
known as the baby, even though just a bit more than a year younger
than I, made the local paper, the
Vineyard Gazette, when
she won something like eight different prizes at the county fair on
a muggy August night by throwing darts at balloons and baseballs at
milk bottles, and so solidified her position as the family''s only
potential athlete--none of the rest of us dared try, for our
parents always preached brains over brawn.
Four Augusts later, Abby''s boyish laughter was no longer heard
along Ocean Park, or anywhere else, her joy in life, and ours in
her, having vanished in a confused instant of rain-slicked asphalt
and an inexperienced teenager''s fruitless effort to evade an
out-of-control sports car, something fancy, seen by several
witnesses but never accurately described and therefore never found;
for the driver who killed my baby sister a few blocks north of the
Washington Cathedral in that first spring of Jimmy Carter''s
presidency left the scene long before the police arrived. That Abby
had only a learner''s permit, not a license, never became a matter
of public knowledge; and the marijuana that was found in her
borrowed car was never again mentioned, least of all by the police
or even the press, because my father was who he was and had the
connections that he did, and, besides, in those days it was not yet
our national sport to ravage the reputations of the great. Abby was
therefore able to die as innocently as we pretended that she had
lived. Addison by that time was on the verge of finishing college
and Mariah was about to begin her sophomore year, leaving me in the
nervous role of what my mother kept calling her only child. And all
that Oak Bluffs summer, as my father, tight-lipped, commuted to the
federal courthouse in Washington and my mother shuffled aimlessly
from one downstairs room to the next, I made it my task to hunt
through the house for memories of Abby--at the bottom of a stack of
books on the black metal cart underneath the television, her
favorite game of Life; in the back of the glass-fronted cabinet
over the sink, a white ceramic mug emblazoned with the legend BLACK
IS BEAUTIFUL, purchased to annoy my father; and, hiding in a corner
of the airless attic, a stuffed panda named George, after the
martyred black militant George Jackson, won at the fair and now
leaking from its joints some hideous pink substance--memories, I
must confess in my perilous middle age, that have grown ever
fainter with the passage of time.
Ah, the Vineyard house! Addison was married in it, twice, once more
or less successfully, and I smashed the leaded glass in the double
front door, also twice, once more or less intentionally. Every
summer of my youth we went there to live, because that is what one
does with a summer home. Every winter my father griped about the
upkeep and threatened to sell it, because that is what one does
when happiness is a questionable investment. And when the cancer
that pursued her for six years finally won, my mother died in it,
in the smallest bedroom, with the nicest view of Nantucket Sound,
because that is what one does if one can choose one''s end.
My father died at his desk. And, at first, only my sister and a few
stoned callers to late-night radio shows believed he had been
murdered.
* * * * * *
THE WHITE KITCHEN
(I)
The news of the Judge''s death reached us several times in the
years before the event actually occurred. It is not that he was
ill; he was, as a rule, so vigorous that one tended to forget his
wavering health, which is why the heart attack that at last cut him
down was, at first, so difficult to credit. It is simply that he
led the sort of life that generated rumor. People disliked my
father, intensely, and he returned the favor. They spread stories
of his death because they prayed the stories were true. To his
enemies--they were legion, a fact in which he gloried--my father
was a plague, and rumors of a cure always raise hopes in those who
suffer, or love those who do. And, in this case, some of those my
father plagued were not people but causes, which, in America, can
always count their lovers in the millions, unlike individual
people, who die unloved every day. Not one of his enemies but hated
my father, and not one but spread the stories. Self-styled friends
would call. They were always whispering how sorry they were. They
had heard, they would say, about my father''s heart attack while
promoting his latest book up in Boston. Or his stroke while taping
a television interview out in Cincinnati. Except that there would
not have been one: he would be alive and well in San Antonio,
speaking to the convention of some conservative political action
committee--the Rightpacs, Kimmer calls them. But, oh, the gleeful
rumors of his demise! My mother hated the rumors, not for the
heartache, she said, but for the humiliation--there were standards,
after all. But not in the rumor mill. Waiting in the checkout line
at the supermarket, just before my son Bentley was born, I was
astonished to read on the cover of one of the more imaginative
tabloids, just beneath the weekly Whitney Houston story (TALKS
CANDIDLY ABOUT HER HEARTBREAK) and just above the latest way to
lose as much weight as you want without diet or exercise (A MIRACLE
DOCTORS WON''T TELL YOU), the gladsome tidings that the Mafia had
put out a contract on my father, because of his cooperation with
federal prosecutors--although, when Kimmer made me go back to the
store and buy it and I read the whole thing, all one hundred fifty
words, I noticed a pointed lack of detail as to what my father
could possibly have to cooperate with prosecutors about, or what he
might know about the Mafia that would be so dangerous. I called
Mrs. Rose, the Judge''s long-suffering assistant, and finally
caught up with him on the road in Seattle. He took the opportunity
to warn me yet again on the insidiousness of his enemies.
"They will do anything, Talcott,
anything to destroy me,"
he announced in the oracular tone he tended to adopt when
discussing those who disliked him. He repeated the word a third
time, in case my hearing was off: "Anything."
Including, I noted while leafing through the pessimistic pages of
The Nation a few years back, accuse him of paranoia. Or
was it megalomania? Anyway, my father was sure they were out to get
him, and my sister was sure they were right. When the Judge skipped
Bentley''s christening three years ago, worried the press might be
there, Mariah defended him, pointing out that he had missed half
the baptisms of her children--no difficult feat, given the
numbers--but by then she and I were barely speaking anyway.
Once a false story of my father''s demise made the real papers--not
the supermarket tabloids, but the
Washington Post, which
killed him on a wintry morning in a commuter plane crash in
Virginia, one among a dozen victims, his apparent presence on board
noted poignantly, but also coyly: CONTROVERSIAL FORMER JUDGE FEARED
DEAD IN CRASH is what the headline said. The irony was plain to the
most casual follower of current events, because what people feared
was not my father dead but my father alive; and because of the
unhappy turning his career took, which was also, my father liked to
say, the fault of the
Post and "its ilk." Left-wing
muckrakers, my father called them in his well-remunerated speeches
to the Rightpacs, who were pleased to hear this angry, articulate
black lawyer blaming the media for his resignation from the federal
bench not long after the collapse of his anticipated elevation to
the Supreme Court, where, his conservative fans loved to remind his
liberal critics, he had argued and won two key desegregation cases
in the sixties. Oh, but he could be confounding! Which is why
Mariah was certain that there were smiles of relief all along the
Cambridge-Washington axis (where she picked up that hackneyed
phrase I will never know, but I suspect it was from Addison, who
could always stand her) when the early editions of the
Post carried the crash story and a couple of the more
careless news-radio stations repeated it. The plague, it seemed for
a glorious instant, was at an end. But my wily father was not on
board. Although his name was on the manifest and he had checked in,
he had prudently chosen that occasion to argue via long distance
with my mother, then busily dying at the Vineyard house, over the
cost of some repairs to the gutters, and the discussion grew
sufficiently extended that he missed the flight. The airline got
its passenger list wrong, this being back in the days when it was
still possible to do such a thing. "That''s how much she loved me,"
the Judge told us in a drunken ramble the night of Claire
Garland''s funeral. He cried, too, which none of us had seen
before--only Addison even claimed to have seen him take a drink
since the bad period just after Abby died--and Mariah slapped my
face when, the very next day, I pointed out to her that, in the six
years of my mother''s illness, my father spent as much time on the
road as he did at her bedside. "So what?" my sister demanded as I
groped for a suitable riposte to a palm across the cheek--a
question, once I thought about it, that I was ill-prepared to
answer.
And perhaps I deserved the rebuke, for the Judge, despite his
coldness toward most of the world, including, usually, his
children, was never anything but tender and affectionate with our
mother. Even when my father was a practicing lawyer, before the
move to government service, he was constantly leaving meetings with
clients to take calls from his Claire. Later, on the Securities and
Exchange Commission and then on the bench, he would sometimes leave
litigants waiting while he chatted with his wife, who seemed to
take such treatment as her due. He smiled for her in a natural
delight that told the world how grateful he was for the day Claire
Morrow said yes; at least until Abby died, after which he did not
do much smiling for a while. Once a semblance of family stability
was re-established, my parents used to take evening walks along
Shepard Street, holding hands.
Of course, my father was on the road constantly. At the time of his
death, he liked to call himself just another Washington lawyer,
which meant that when he wanted to reach me he would have Mrs. Rose
place the call, his own time being too precious, and, when I came
on the line, he would invariably put me on the speakerphone,
perhaps to leave his hands free for other work. Mrs. Rose told me
once that I should not be upset: he put everybody on the
speakerphone, treating it as though it had just been invented.
Indeed, everything that he was doing was new to him. He was,
formally, of counsel to the law firm of Corcoran &
Klein--
of counsel being a term of art covering a multitude
of awkward relationships, from the retired partner who no longer
does any lawyering to the out-of-work bureaucrat trying to bring in
enough business to earn a full partnership to the go-go consultant
looking for a respectable place to hang a shingle. In my father''s
case, the firm offered a veneer of gentility and a place to take
his messages, but little more. He saw few clients. He practiced no
law. He wrote books, went on nationwide speaking tours, and, when
he needed a rest, showed up on
Nightline and
Crossfire and
Imus to beguile the evil armies of
the left. Indeed, he was the perfect talk-show guest: he was
willing to say nearly anything about nearly anybody, and he would
call anyone who argued with him the most erudite and puzzling
names. (The censors would have a terrible time when he used words
like
wittol and
pettifoggery, and he was once
bleeped out on one of the radio talk shows for describing a
particular candidate''s shift to the right during the Republican
presidential primaries as an act of
ecdysis.) Oh, yes,
people hated him, and he reveled in their enmity.
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.
* * * * * *
(II)
The first thing I notice about Uncle Jack is that he is ill. Jack
Ziegler was never a very large man, but he always seemed a menacing
one. I do not know how many people he has killed, although I often
fear that it is more than the numbers hinted at in the press. I
have not seen him in well over a decade and have not missed him.
But the changes in the man! Now he is frail, the suit of fine gray
wool and the dark blue scarf hanging loosely on his emaciated
frame. The square, strong face I remember from my boyhood, when he
would visit us on the Vineyard, armed with expensive gifts,
wonderful brainteasers, and terrible jokes, is falling in on
itself; the silver hair, still reasonably thick, lies matted on his
head; and his pale pink lips tremble when he is not speaking, and
sometimes when he is. He approaches in the company of a taller and
broader and much younger man, who silently steadies him when he
stumbles. A friend, I think, except that the Jack Zieglers of the
world have no friends. A bodyguard, then. Or, given Uncle Jack''s
physical condition, perhaps a nurse.
"Well, look who''s here," Addison seethes.
"Let me handle this," I insist with my usual stupidity. I
discipline myself not to speculate about what Mariah suggested as
we sat in the kitchen Friday night.
"All yours."
Before Jack Ziegler quite reaches us, I warn Kimmer to stay down by
the car with Bentley, and, for once, she does as I ask without an
argument, for no potential judge can be seen even chatting with
such a man. Uncle Mal steps forward as though to run the same
interference for me that he does for his clients as they leave the
grand jury, but I motion him back and tell him I will be fine. Then
I turn and hurry up the hill. Mariah, of course, is already gone,
which is just as well, for this apparition might push her over the
edge. Only Addison remains nearby, just far enough away to be
polite, but close enough to be of help if . . . if what?
"Hello, Uncle Jack," I say as Abby''s godfather and I arrive,
simultaneously, at the grave. Then I wait. He does not extend his
hand and I do not offer mine. His bodyguard or whatever stands off
to the side and a little bit behind, eyeing my brother uneasily. (I
myself am evidently too unthreatening to excite his
vigilance.)
"I bring you my condolences, Talcott," Jack Ziegler murmurs in his
peculiar accent, vaguely East European, vaguely Brooklyn, vaguely
Harvard, which my father always insisted was manufactured, as phony
as Eddie Dozier''s East Texas drawl. As Uncle Jack speaks, his eyes
are cast downward, toward the grave. "I am so sorry about the death
of your father."
"Thank you. I''m afraid we missed you at the church--"
"I despise funerals." Spoken matter-of-factly, like a discussion of
weather, or sports, or interstate flight to avoid prosecution. "I
have no interest in the celebration of death. I have seen too many
good men die."
Some by your own hand, I am thinking, and I wonder if the other,
rarely mentioned rumors are true, if I am talking to a man who
murdered his own wife. Again Mariah''s fears assail me. My
sister''s chronology possesses a certain mad logic--emphasis on the
adjective: my father saw Jack Ziegler, my father called Mariah, my
father died a few days later, then Jack Ziegler called Mariah, and
now Jack Ziegler is here. I finally shared Mariah''s notion with
Kimmer as we lay in bed last night. My wife, head on my shoulder,
giggled and said that it sounds to her more like two old friends
who see each other all the time. Having no basis, yet, to decide, I
say only: "Thank you for coming. Now, if you will excuse
me--"
"Wait," says Jack Ziegler, and, for the first time, he turns his
eyes up to meet mine. I take half a step back, for his face, close
up, is a horror. His pale, papery skin is ravaged by nameless
diseases that seem to me--whatever they are--an appropriate
punishment for the life he has chosen to live. But it is his eyes
that draw my attention. They are twin coals, hot and alive, burning
with a dark, happy madness that should be visited on all murderers
at some time before they die.
"Uncle Jack, I''m s-sorry," I manage. Did I actually stammer? "I
have--I have to get going--"
"Talcott, I have traveled thousands of miles to see you. Surely you
can spare me five of your valuable minutes." His voice has a
terrible wheeze in it, and it occurs to me that I might be
breathing whatever has made him this way. But I stand my
ground.
"I understand you''ve been looking for me," I say at last.
"Yes." He seems childishly eager now, and he almost smiles, but
thinks better of it. "Yes, that is so, I have been looking for
you."
"You knew where to find me." I was raised to be polite, but seeing
Uncle Jack like this, after all these years, brings out in me an
irresistible urge to be rude. "You could have called me at
home."
"That would not be--it was not possible. They know, you see, they
would consider that, and I thought--I thought perhaps . . ." He
trails off, the dark eyes all at once confused, and I realize that
Uncle Jack is frightened of something. I hope it is the specter of
prison or of his obviously approaching death that is scaring him,
because anything else bad enough to scare Jack Ziegler is . . .
well, something I do not want to meet.
"Okay, okay. You found me." Perhaps this is forward, but I am not
so frightened of him now; on the other hand, I am not very happy
about spending time in his company either. I want to flee this
sickly scarecrow and retreat to the warmth, such as it is, of my
family.
"Your father was a very fine man," says Uncle Jack, "and a very
good friend. We did much together. Not much business, mostly
pleasure."
"I see."
"The newspapers, you know, they wrote of our business dealings.
There were no business dealings. It was nonsense. Trumped-up
nonsense."
"I know," I lie, for Uncle Jack''s benefit, but he is not
interested in my opinions.
"That law clerk of his, perjuring himself that way." He makes a
spitting noise but does not actually spit. "Scum." He shakes his
head in feigned disbelief. "The papers, of course, they loved it.
Left-wing bastards. Because they hated your father."
Not having exchanged a word with Jack Ziegler since well before my
father''s hearings, I have never heard his opinions about what
happened. Given the tenor of his comments, I doubt he would be
interested in mine. I remain silent.
"I hear the fool has never been able to get a job," says Uncle
Jack, without a trace of humor, and I know who has been pulling at
least a few of the strings. "I am not surprised."
"He was doing what he thought was right."
"He was lying in an effort to destroy a great man, and he is
deserving of his fate."
I cannot take much more of this. As Jack Ziegler continues to rant,
Mariah''s nutty speculations of Friday seem . . . not so nutty.
"Uncle Jack . . ."
"He was a great man, your father," Jack Ziegler interrupts. "A very
great man, a very good friend. But now that he is dead, well . . ."
He trails off and raises his hand, palm upmost, and tilts it one
way, then the other. "Now I would very much like to be of
assistance to you."
"To me?"
"Correct, Talcott. And to your family, naturally," he adds softly,
rubbing his temples. The skin is so loose it seems to move under
his fingers. I imagine it tearing away to leave only an unhappy
skull.
I glance over at the cars. Kimmer is impatient. So is Uncle Mal. I
look down at my baby sister''s godfather once more. His help is the
very last thing I want.
"Well, thank you, but I think we have everything under
control."
"But you will call? If you need anything, you will call? Especially
if . . . an emergency should arise?"
I shrug. "Okay."
"With your wife, for instance," he continues. "I understand that
she is going to become a judge. I think that is wonderful. I
understand that she has always wanted this."
"It isn''t certain yet," I answer automatically, surprised that the
secret has spread up into the Rocky Mountains, and also not wanting
Jack Ziegler anywhere near her nomination. He has already spoiled
one judicial career too many. "She isn''t the only
candidate."
"I know this." The burning eyes are gleeful again. "I understand
that a colleague of yours believes the job to be his for the
taking. Some would call him the front-runner."
I am thrown, once more, by the breadth of his knowledge; I choose
not to wonder how he knows what he knows. I am glad that Kimmer is
not within earshot.
"I suppose so. But, look, I have to--"
"Listen, Talcott. Are you listening?" He has drawn close to me
again. "I do not think he has the staying power, this colleague of
yours. It is my understanding that a fairly large skeleton is
rattling around in his closet. And we all know what that means,
eh?" He coughs violently. "Sooner or later, it is bound to tumble
out."
"What kind of skeleton?" I ask, sudden eagerness overwhelming my
caution.
"I would not concern myself with such things if I were you. I would
not share them with your lovely wife. I would wait patiently for
the wheel to turn."
I am mystified, but not precisely unhappy. If there is information
that would kill off Marc Hadley''s chances, I can hardly wait for
it to--what did he say?--tumble out. Even though Marc and I were
once friends, I cannot resist a rising excitement. Perhaps
America''s obsession with the use of scandal to disqualify nominees
for the bench is absurd, but this is my wife we are talking
about.
Still, what can Jack Ziegler possibly know about Marc Hadley that
nobody else does?
"Thank you, Uncle Jack," I say uncertainly.
"I am always happy to be of assistance to any of Oliver''s
children." His voice has assumed a curiously formal tone. I am
chilled once more. Is the skeleton something that he has somehow
created? Is a criminal maneuvering to help my wife attain her
longed-for seat on the bench? I have to say something, and it is
not easy to decide what.
"Uh, Uncle Jack, I . . . I''m grateful that you would think to
help, but . . ."
His disintegrating eyebrows slowly rise. Otherwise his expression
does not change. He knows what I am trying to say but has no
intention of making it easy.
"Well, it''s just that I think Kimmer . . . Kimberly . . . wants to
have the selection go forward so that, um, the better candidate
wins. On the merits. She wouldn''t want anybody to . . .
interfere." And I am suddenly sure, as I say the difficult words,
that what I am telling him is true. My smart, ambitious wife never
wants to be beholden to anybody, for anything. When we were
students, she made a name for herself around the building with her
outspoken opposition to affirmative action, which she saw as just
another way for white liberals to place black people in their
debt.
Maybe she was right.
Uncle Jack, meanwhile, has his answer ready: "Oh, Talcott, Talcott,
please have no fear on that account. I am not proposing to . . .
interfere." He chuckles lightly, then coughs. "I am only predicting
what is to occur. I have information. I am not going to use it. Nor
do you need to do so. Your colleague, your wife''s rival, has many,
many enemies. One of them is certain to unlock the door and allow
the skeleton to tumble out. The service I am doing for you is
simply to let you know. Nothing more."
I nod. Standing up to Jack Ziegler has drained me.
"And now it is your turn," he continues. "I think perhaps you,
Talcott, might be of assistance to me."
I close my eyes briefly. What did I expect? He did not travel all
this way to tell me that Marc Hadley''s candidacy is going to
collapse, or to pay his last respects to my father. He came because
he wants something.
"Talcott, you must listen to me. Listen with care. I must ask you
one question."
"Go ahead." I want suddenly to be free of him. I want to share his
odd news with Kimmer, even though he told me not to. I want her to
kiss me happily, overjoyed that she seems to be on the verge of
getting what she wants.
"Others will ask this of you, some with good motives, some with
ill," he explains unhelpfully in his mysterious accent. "Not all of
them will be who they say they are, and not all of them will mean
you well."
I forgot Uncle Jack''s eerie, unfathomable certainty that all the
world is conspiring, but he evidently has changed little from the
days when he used to drop by the Vineyard house with gifts from
foreign ports and complaints about the machinations of the
Kennedys, whose irresolution, he used to say, cost us Cuba. None of
the children knew what he was talking about, but we loved the
passion of his stories.
"Okay," I say.
"And so I must ask what they will ask," he continues, the mad eyes
sparkling.
"Well, fire away," I sigh. Over by the limousine, Kimmer is
glancing at her watch and raising her hand, beckoning, to urge me
to hurry. Maybe she has another telephone meeting coming up. Maybe
she, too, is scared of Jack Ziegler, whom she has never quite met.
Maybe I need to get this over with. "But I really only have a few
minutes to . . ."
"The arrangements, Talcott," he interrupts in that wheezy whisper.
"I must know everything about the arrangements."
* * * * * *
I stand for a long moment in the narrow front yard, the key
dangling from limp fingers, remembering the glorious Martha''s
Vineyard summers of my childhood, when friends and family swirled
constantly in and out of the double front doors with their tiny
panes of glass, some rose, some azure, some clear, held fast in
frames of involute leading; remembering the many sad and lonely
visits to this house through those endless months when my mother
sat dying, often alone, in the front bedroom on the first floor;
and remembering, too, how easy it became to avoid coming back here
once the Judge began his tumble toward megalomania. As Kimmer
fusses with Bentley and I stare at the summer home of my youth, I
find that I have difficulty recalling precisely why I was so filled
with joy when I learned that the Judge left me this cramped and
unhappy shell. With my parents both dead, the house should by
rights be dead as well, quiet and neutral; instead, it seems almost
a live thing, fiendishly sentient, brooding malevolently on the
family''s misfortunes as it awaits the new owners. Quite suddenly I
am paralyzed with some emotion far more primal than terror, a clear
and utterly persuasive knowledge, shivering through me from some
unnatural source, that everything is about to go wretchedly wrong:
I fear that my legs will not move me to the porch, or my hands will
not work the key, or the key will break off in the lock. In that
terrible moment, I want to reject this scary inheritance and all
its ghosts, to grab my family and hurry back to the mainland.
As usual, it is worldly Kimmer who restores me to my senses.
"Can you hurry up and open the door?" she demands sweetly. "Sorry,
but I have to piss in the worst way."
"No need to be vulgar."
"There is if nothing else will get you moving."
She is correct, after a fashion, and I am being foolish. I smile at
her and she almost smiles back before she catches herself. I heft
the heavy suitcase in my left hand and bounce the key in my right.
Then I stride boldly up the steps, heedless of the demons who caper
in the shadows of memory. Drawing a breath, I dismiss them like a
veteran exorcist and rattle the key into the lock. Only as the lock
begins to turn do I notice that one of the tiny panes of colored
glass is missing--not broken, just not there, so that through the
space defined by the narrow gray leading I can see into the
darkness of the house. I frown, pushing the door wide open, and,
standing frozen on the threshold of the house I have loved for
thirty years, I realize that the goblins have not all retreated. I
try to swallow but cannot seem to gather any moisture in my throat.
My limbs refuse to move me forward. Through a slowly descending
curtain of the deepest angry red, I see my handsome wife brushing
past me with a whispered, "Sorry, but I gotta go," and I feel her
transferring Bentley''s hand to mine.
Kimmer is three steps into the house before she, too, stops and
stands perfectly still.
"Oh, no," she whispers. "Oh Misha oh no."
The house is a disaster. Furniture is upended, books are strewn
over the floor, cabinet doors broken, rugs sliced to ribbons. My
father''s papers are everywhere, the breeze from the open front
door ruffling their edges. I peek into the kitchen. A few of the
dishes are smashed on the floor, but the mess is not as bad, and
most of the plates are simply stacked on the counter. While Kimmer
waits in the front room with Bentley, I force myself to go
upstairs. I discover that the four bedrooms are barely disturbed.
As though there was no need to bother, I am thinking as I stand in
the window of the master suite, telephone in hand, talking to the
police dispatcher. As I explain what has happened, I look down at
the BMW, parked illegally along the split-rail fence that guards
the south side of Ocean Avenue, doors still open, baggage not yet
unloaded. Something isn''t right. They did not wreck the second
floor. The thought keeps swirling through my mind. They left the
second floor alone. As though ransacking the first floor was
enough. As though--as though--
As though they found what they were looking for.
Now more puzzled than frightened, I go back downstairs to join my
wife and son, who, wide-eyed, are hugging each other in the living
room. The police, arriving in minutes from their quaint
headquarters a block away, quickly pronounce the destruction the
work of local vandals, teenagers who, unfortunately, spend much of
the winter trashing the homes of the summer people. Not all the
Vineyard''s teenagers are vandals, or even very many: just enough
to annoy. The very kind officers apologize to us on behalf of the
Island and assure us that they will do their best, but they also
warn us not to expect to catch the people who did it: vandalisms
are nearly impossible to solve.
Vandals. Kimmer eagerly accepts this explanation, and I am quite
sure the insurance company will too. And, more important, the White
House. Kimmer promises to make plenty of trouble for the alarm
company, and I have no doubt she will keep her word. Vandals, my
wife and I agree over pizza and root beer at a nearby restaurant a
couple of hours later, after the man who looks after the house in
the off-season has dropped by to inspect the damage.
"I''ll make some calls," he told us when he finished tut-tutting
his way around the place.
Vandals. Of course they were vandals. The kind of vandals who
destroy one floor of the house and ignore the other. The kind of
vandals who steal neither stereo nor television. The kind of
vandals who know how to circumvent my late paranoid father''s
state-of-the-art alarm system. And the kind of vandals who are in
direct contact with the spirits of the departed. For I do not tell
either my wife or the friendly police officers about the note I
found upstairs while waiting, sealed in a plain white envelope left
on top of the dresser in the master bedroom, my correct title and
full name typed neatly on the outside, the perplexing message on
the inside written in the crabbed, spiky hand I remember from my
childhood, when we would proudly leave copies of our school essays
on the Judge''s desk and wait for him to return them, a day or so
later, with his comments inked redly in the margins, demonstrating
what idiots our teachers were to award us A''s.
The note on the dresser is from my father.
* * *
Ordinarily, on the third afternoon of a Vineyard sojourn, I would
be at the Flying Horses with my son. But our sojourns are usually
in the summer. Now it is autumn, and the carousel is closed for the
season. Fortunately, the Island offers other diversions. Yesterday,
as a hastily assembled clean-up crew tried to put Vinerd Howse back
in some kind of order, the three of us journeyed up-Island--that
is, to the westernmost end--and spent a marvelous afternoon walking
the breathtaking ancient cliffs at Gay Head in the chilly November
air, picnicking in our down parkas at the perfect pebbly beach in
the fishing village of Menemsha, and driving the wooded back roads
of Chilmark, near the sprawling property once owned by Jacqueline
Onassis, pretending not to be on the lookout for the rich and
famous. We had dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water in
Edgartown, where Bentley charmed the waitresses with his patter.
How many demons we exorcised I am not sure, but I saw no sign of
the roller woman, who might be a phantom after all, and Kimmer did
not mention the judgeship once and talked on her cell phone only
twice. And she kissed me quite carefully this morning when Bentley
and I dropped her at the airport for her flight back to the
mainland in one of the little turboprops that serve the Island.
Bentley and I are staying on because . . . well, because we need
to. Kimmer has work to do, I have a week or so of leave left, and
Bentley needs some rest and recreation. And there is another reason
as well. In Oak Bluffs, unlike Elm Harbor, I will never be tempted
for a moment to let my precious son out of my sight.
Right now my son and I are preparing to go to the playground; or,
more precisely, Bentley is ready, waiting for me.
I am less ready.
I am sitting at the table in our newly cleaned kitchen (full of
plastic plates and cups from one of the Island''s two A&Ps),
the note from my father flattened on the surface, willing its
secrets to reveal themselves. In the next room, Bentley is watching
the Disney Channel and occasionally waddling to the door of the
kitchen and calling, "Dada, paygrown now. You say paygrown!" in the
plaintive, self-righteous tone that makes busy parents writhe with
guilt. To which I respond with the familiar "Yes, okay, just a
minute, sweetheart," which every busy parent uses with equal
embarrassment.
Last night, as my family slept uneasily, Kimmer curled protectively
around our son, I wandered Vinerd Howse from the foyer to the attic
crawl space, searching for something, but I do not know what. I
need to know what is going on. I need a clue.
Unfortunately, the most obvious clue, my father''s note, remains
gibberish:
My son,
There is so much I wish I could share with you. Alas, at the
present moment, I cannot. I have asked a good friend to deliver
this note should anything befall me; if you are reading my words,
one must assume that something has. I apologize for the complexity
of this method of contact, but there are others who would also like
to know that which is for your eyes only. So, know this much:
Angela''s boyfriend, despite his deteriorating condition, is in
possession of that which I want you to know. You are in no danger,
neither you nor your family, but you have little time. You are
unlikely to be the only one who is searching for the arrangements
that Angela''s boyfriend alone can reveal. And you may not be the
only one who knows who Angela''s boyfriend is.
Excelsior, my son! Excelsior! It begins!
Sincerely,
Your Father
The handwriting is unmistakably the Judge''s, as is the flowery,
overwrought, self-important prose, even the formality of the
signature. Quite unexpectedly, my fury at my father threatens
suddenly to overwhelm me. If you want to tell me, tell me! I rage
against him in my tortured mind, a tone I would never have selected
in life. But don''t play these games! Jack Ziegler in the cemetery
demanded to know about the arrangements. Now, at last, I know for
certain that my father actually made some. But I do not know what
they are, and this hint, this clue, this post-mortem letter from my
paranoid father, whatever it is supposed to be, lends me no
assistance at all.
Excelsior? Angela''s boyfriend, despite his deteriorating
condition? What is all this?
One point is clear: Not-McDermott''s mission in Elm Harbor was
neither to apologize nor to reassure but, as I suspected, to see
whether I know an Angela or not--which means that he and,
presumably, Foreman are somehow privy to the contents of this
letter. I wonder if the letter was the reason for the destruction
of the first floor, except that I cannot quite fathom why they
would break into the house, find the letter, and then leave it
behind.
Or, for that matter, how the letter got here in the first place.
Presumably McDermott, if he was even here, would not have dropped
it off. The Judge wrote that he asked a good friend to deliver it
should anything befall him. But what good friend would break into
Vinerd Howse to drop it off? Why not mail it to my house or bring
it by my office? Why not deliver it to . . .
. . . to the soup kitchen?
Can the pawn be connected to the letter? Did my father arrange that
delivery as well? I try to remember whether I ever mentioned to my
father that I volunteer at the soup kitchen, but my mind offers
every answer I could want: yes, I told him; no, I did not tell him;
yes, I hinted at it; no, I kept it secret. I shake my head in rich
red anger. If he wanted me to have the pawn, wouldn''t he have
delivered pawn and letter together?
Not that it matters. For my father''s note is actually no help at
all.
I have a terrible memory for names, but it is good enough for me to
be sure that I do not know an Angela, and I have no idea who her
boyfriend could possibly be.
From the Hardcover edition.
1. How does The Emperor of Ocean Park differ
from more conventional mysteries? In what ways is the narrator,
Talcott Garland, unlike his counterparts-men like Philip Marlow,
Sam Spade, and their descendants-in the prototypical mystery?
2. How does Carter build and sustain suspense throughout the
novel? What are the several mysteries Talcott is trying to solve?
What discoveries does he make-about his father, his wife, his
brother, Jack Ziegler, Justice Wainwright, and others-over the
course of the novel? What effect do these discoveries have on
him?
3. The issue of race is a recurrent theme in The Emperor
of Ocean Park. What is Talcott's attitude toward race? In
what instances is he subject to racial stereotyping? What
observations does he make about the white liberal racism he
encounters on campus? What racial hypocrisies does he see in his
fellow blacks?
4. At the Judge's funeral, Aunt Alma cryptically tells Talcott
that he has "the chance to make everything right. . . . You can fix
it. . . . But your daddy will let you know what to do when the time
comes" [p. 24]. Like Hamlet, Talcott is charged by his father,
beyond the grave, to set things right. In what other ways is
Talcott a Hamlet-like character? In what ways must he both fulfill
and transcend his father's demands?
5. What makes Jack Ziegler such a frightening character? In what
ways is he more than a mere villain? In what sense is he, as
Talcott says, the "author" of the Garland family's misery?
6. Talcott's cousin Sally tells him: "You think you're so
different from Uncle Oliver, but you're just like him. In some good
ways, sure, but in some of the worst ways, too. You look down your
nose at people you think are your moral inferiors. People like your
brother. People like me" [p. 270]. Is she right? In what other ways
is Talcott like his father? How is he different from him?
7. What role do the chess problems play in the novel? How do
they lead Talcott to uncover his father's "arrangements"? How are
they related to issues of race and power? In what sense is Talcott
himself a pawn?
8. When a man calls his house asking for his wife, Talcott
thinks: "Odd the way the immediate concerns about a dying marriage
can knock worries about torture and murder and mysterious chess
pieces right out of the box, but priorities are funny that way" [p.
453]. In what ways is the story of Talcott and Kimmer's failing
marriage-and the larger story of the complex relations in the
Garland family-more important than the murder mystery? How are his
marital problems related to the mystery he is trying to solve?
9. The Emperor of Ocean Park describes a social
milieu rarely seen in American fiction: the black middle class.
What does the novel tell us about the highly successful people who
make up this class? How are they different from African Americans
more commonly encountered in modern and contemporary fiction?
10. Late in the novel, "a wave of fatalism" sweeps over Talcott
and he wonders "whether I could have done anything differently, or
if, once the Judge died, setting his awful plan in motion, and Jack
Ziegler showed up demanding to know the arrangements, everything
else was fixed. Whether my marriage, even, was doomed from the day
of the funeral" [p. 533]. Is the story fated to end as it does or
could Talcott have changed its outcome? What might he have done
differently?
11. The Emperor of Ocean Park is not merely a
thriller, but also an extended critique of American culture,
commenting on issues of family, religion, law, education, race,
marriage, wealth, and politics. What do the frequent philosophical
digressions add to the novel? What beliefs and values does Talcott
Garland try to live by?
12. During a dinner-table argument, Dr. Young asserts that Satan
"always attacks us in the same ways. . . . He attacks us with
sexual desire and other temptations that distract the body. He
attacks us with drink and drugs and other temptations that addle
the brain. He attacks us with racial hatred and love of money and
other temptations that distort the soul" [p. 346]. How does this
perspective illuminate the behavior of the major characters in the
novel? Who gives in to the temptations that Dr. Young describes in
this speech? Who resists them?
13. How do Talcott's relationships with his family-with his
father, his sister, his brother, his wife, and his son-change over
the course of the novel?
14. When Talcott retells the story of how he and his future wife
had gotten out of the Burial Ground by crawling through a drainage
tunnel, he writes: "Some metaphors need no interpretation" [p.
515]. Is the meaning of this metaphor obvious? How should the
escape from the cemetery be interpreted? How is the Burial Ground
itself important to the novel's plot?
15. As the Judge's secret life is revealed, Dana Worth, a woman
who had always admired Oliver Garland, tells Talcott: "I don't want
to say he was evil . . . but he wasn't just deluded, either" [p.
615]. How should the Judge finally be judged? What drove him to do
what he did? Are his actions understandable? Forgivable?
16. When he delivers the eulogy at Theo Mountain's funeral,
Talcott breaks down weeping. "I suppose people think I was crying
over Theo. Maybe I was, a little. But, mainly, I was crying over
all the good things that will never be again, and the way the Lord,
when you least expect it, forces you to grow up" [p. 620]. What are
the "good things" Talcott mourns the loss of here? In what ways has
the Lord forced him to "grow up"? How have the events of the novel
changed him?