call his own.”
This wins me the coveted Dear Dana Worth grin of approval.
“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, Brother Hadley also has the greatest writer’s block in the history of Western civilization. So maybe stealing somebody else’s ideas is better than never publishing at all, huh?”
I shake my head. This is happening too fast. Kimmer’s path is suddenly clear-
Except-except-
“Dana, what exactly is Marc supposed to have done?”
“Well, this is the good part, my dear.” She hops off my desk and begins to wear the familiar circle in my carpet. “It seems that some student was going through the archives out at UCLA, you know, throwing away old files-”
“- and he comes across some papers of none other than Pericles Mountain,” I tell Kimmer on the telephone minutes later, having had her secretary call her out of a meeting as soon as Dana went on to spread the bad news along the corridor. I sense my wife’s growing impatience as I repeat the story Dana told me. Impatience, but excitement too. “And so now he’s sitting there in some subbasement of the UCLA Law School, reading through this stuff, the way students do when they’d rather not be working, and it happens that he just read Marc’s book in one of his classes, and he notices this draft, and the language is very similar, and he gets to wondering if this is maybe an early draft of the book. Like maybe he can show it off next week in the seminar, surprise everybody by telling them what the great Marc Hadley thought about writing before he changed his mind.” We both laugh. Kimmer is so delighted by this news that we are almost happy together. “Only, when he looks at it a little more closely, it turns out not to be a draft of The Constitutional Mind. It’s just a draft of some paper that Perry Mountain wrote. He’s about to throw it away, but the similarity of the language sticks in his mind. So he saves it from the recycling bin and takes it back to his apartment and a couple of days later he compares it with the book and, sure enough, it’s almost word for word the same. So the next day he tells his professor, and one professor tells another, and, well, here we are.”
“I don’t believe it,” my wife marvels, although she plainly does. “Do you know what this means, Misha? I can’t believe it.”
“I know what it means, darling.”
“He’ll have to withdraw, won’t he? He’ll have to.”
She is almost giddy, a Kimmer I have never seen.
“I think you’re right. He’ll have to withdraw. Congratulations, Your Honor.”
“Oh, honey, this is so wonderful.” It strikes me suddenly that Kimmer is taking a little too much pleasure in her rival’s misfortune-or, rather, misfeasance-and it seems to strike her, too. “I mean, I’m sorry for Marc and all, and, if I’m gonna get it, I didn’t want to get it this way. This is just…” A pause. I can almost hear her mood beginning to shift, even if for no other reason than that she is moody. “Have you talked to Mallory?”
“Nobody but you.”
“I’d love to know what folks are saying in D.C.”
“I’ll call him as soon as we’re done,” I promise.
“I think I’ll make a few calls of my own.” I am not sure why this strikes me as more ominous than optimistic.
“It’s pretty amazing,” I say, just to keep the conversation going.
“But I don’t get it.” Kimmer throws in an objection because she thinks human beings are rational. “I don’t understand why he would be so stupid. Marc, I mean.”
“Well, we all make mistakes.”
“This is a pretty big one.” As she thinks it through, her mood shift continues, clouds of doubt forming. I can hear it in her voice. “It doesn’t make any sense, Misha. Why would Marc copy it? Wouldn’t he be afraid of getting caught?”
“Well, here’s the interesting part. It turns out that Perry Mountain got sick and never published the article. The Constitutional Mind came out three years after Perry Mountain died.”
Skeptical Kimmer remains unpersuaded. Her good humor is definitely beginning to fade. “And nobody noticed? Perry didn’t send a draft to anybody else? Maybe Theo, for instance? I mean, I’d have thought Theo would be screaming from the day the book was published.”
I frown. I did not consider this possibility. I tell her I will call Dana and see.
“Dana is your source for all this?” Kimmer splutters. Thinking to bring my wife the news she most wants to hear, I have instead managed to anger her. “I mean, come on, Misha, I know she’s your buddy and all, but it’s not like she always has her facts right.”
“Kimmer-”
“And she can’t stand Marc,” my wife adds, as though she herself can. “So maybe she’s a little biased.”
“On the other hand, she always knows what’s going on around here.”
“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.
“Sure 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.
