small jolt will split it in two. I try to pray, but cannot concentrate. I sit at my desk, unable to work, furious at my father, wondering what would have happened if I had refused to talk to Jack Ziegler that day in the cemetery. Probably I would have been stuck with my father’s note anyway, I would still be wondering who Angela’s boyfriend was, and the dead would still be dead, so there is no point in wondering…
The dead would still be dead…
My mood brightens. I remember the idea that came to me at Shirley Branch’s dinner party. In the light of day, I pooh-poohed it, but now I am desperate. And it just might offer me and my family a way out of this mess. The dead. The cemetery. Maybe, just maybe. I do not know if it will work, but there is no harm in preparing, in case I decide to give it a try. I start by calling Karl at his bookstore to ask him a question about the Double Excelsior. He is patient if not exactly friendly, and he thanks me for returning his book. As a result of his answer, I decide to keep planning. Only I will need some help. Later in the afternoon, after my administrative law class, I scurry down to the second floor to look for Dana Worth, but the sign on her door says that she is in the Faculty Reading Room. She always leaves a sign, because she always wants people to be able to find her: talking to people seems to be her favorite thing. And so it is that I make a huge mistake. In my eagerness to find Dana, I go into the library I usually avoid, and everything goes to pieces.
Most professors sit in their offices, buzzing the faculty librarian to bring them books they want, or even having their secretaries do the buzzing, but I now and then like to go and soak up the feel of the place, or I used to, before the first hints that Kimmer might be having an affair with Jerry Nathanson. At ten minutes to five, I use my faculty key to open the side entrance to the law library, on the third floor, away from the hubbub of the students. The key admits me to the back of the periodical room, two dozen parallel rows of gunmetal shelves stuffed with painfully organized, dog-eared law reviews. Hesitating to go forward, I look for a chance to hang back. If I am going to proceed, I need help urgently, and Dana is the only one I can think of who might be crazy enough to do it. Rob Saltpeter is too much the straight arrow, Lem Carlyle too much the politician. I have considered and rejected enlisting the help of a student. It is Dana or nobody. Striding uncertainly through the periodical room, I hear some students coming and decide to disguise my purpose, for, although I would never hesitate to enter Dana’s office alone, I am uncomfortable at the thought that I might be observed chasing her down in the library. But my need is sufficiently pressing that I must get the answer immediately, or I will go out of my mind. I pull at random an old bound volume of the Columbia Law Review, leafing through it as though hunting ancient treasure. Walking along the aisles, carrying the heavy book as camouflage, I stop near the noisy old machine that makes blurred photocopies, and steel myself. Then I leave the periodical room and enter the main reading room, deliberately refusing to look up at the wall where the portrait of my father in his robes still hangs. If you examine the painting carefully, you can detect the poorly painted restoration work covering the nasty language with which somebody defaced the canvas during his confirmation hearings: UNCLE TOM was the least of it, with various comments about the Judge’s ancestry appended by some political commentator too modest to sign his name to his work.
I never examine it carefully.
As I cross the wide room, a few bold students say hello, but most of them are far too savvy. They can read the faces of the faculty, they know when to interrupt and when to hang back. I pass a clutch of black students, a gaggle of white ones. I wave to Shirley Branch, who is standing next to a bank of computers, hands in frenetic motion as she makes some point, quite vehemently, to Matt Goffe, her fellow untenured professor, and fellow leftie. I spot Avery Knowland at the other end of the room, bending hopelessly over a casebook, but my path, fortunately, is not taking me in that direction. I wonder how angry his father really is. Maybe Cameron Knowland and his trophy wife will take their three million dollars back and we can keep the gloriously seedy library we have now. The Dean wants us to have a building worthy of the twenty-first century, but I think libraries should remain firmly planted in the nineteenth, when the stability of the printed word, not the ephemeron of the fiber-optic cable, was the method through which information was transmitted over long distances. I adore this room. Some of the long tables where students sit studying are more than half a century old. The ceiling is almost three stories high, but the brass chandeliers have been reduced to mere decorations: banks of hideous fluorescents now provide the light, in tandem with the sun that prisms through the clerestory windows high up above the intricately carved wooden shelves of law books. For those with the patience to follow, each window’s stained-glass picture adds a frame to a story that begins just above the main entrance to the library, chases around all four outer walls, and winds up back in the same place: a violent crime, a witness signaling a police officer, the arrest of a suspect, a trial, a jury deliberating, a conviction, a punishment, a new lawyer, an appeal, a release, and, in the end, back to the same life of crime, a pessimistically unbroken cycle that drove me half mad when I was a student.
I smile at the reference librarian as I circle his long desk. He does not smile back: he is on the phone and, if the rumors are true, is probably placing a bet. On the other side of the desk is the Faculty Reading Room, as my destination is pompously called. I am about to use my faculty key to unlock the FARR when the double doors of frosted glass open in front of me and Lemaster Carlyle and Dana Worth saunter out, laughing together, evidently at some Worthism, because Lem is laughing harder.
“Hello, Tal,” says Lem quietly. He is his usual dapper self, sporting a medium-gray sports jacket and a crimson Harvard tie.
“Lem.”
“Misha, darling,” murmurs Dear Dana, and I remind myself to tell her not to call me that in public. She, too, is nicely turned out, in a dark business suit.
“Dana, do you have a minute?”
“That depends on how you plan to vote on Bonnie Ziffren,” Dana smiles, naming one in the endless stream of candidates recommended by the faculty appointments committee to whom Dear Dana, on one ground or another, objects. “I know Marc thinks she’s the next Catharine MacKinnon, but, in my opinion? She’s a zircon in the rough.”
“You shouldn’t talk about potential faculty appointments in public,” Lem reminds her piously. He is, once more, avoiding my gaze. “By university rule, personnel matters are confidential.”
“Then come into my parlor.” She points to the FARR.
“No, thanks,” murmurs Lemaster. In fact, he remembers that he has to run: dinner with some visiting potentate from the American Law Institute. You can always count on faculty politics to drive Lemaster Carlyle away. He yearns for the law school’s lost golden age, which he missed entirely but nevertheless loves, when the professors all got along with each other, even if those who were there, such as Theo Mountain and Amy Hefferman, recall it differently. He rushes off without a farewell, still unable to look me in the eye.
What is going on with him? Kimmer’s lover? The deliverer of the pawn? I rub my forehead, furious again, not at Lem but at the Judge. Dear Dana Worth, noticing the sudden change in my mood, lays a gentle hand on my arm. She waits until she is sure Lem is out of earshot and then asks me softly what I want.
“We better discuss this in private,” I tell her, still wondering what might be wrong with Lemaster, and whether it has to do with… well, with everything.
“Come into my parlor,” she teases again. I hesitate, not wanting to be seen sneaking into the FARR with a female colleague, especially a white one, even if she has no interest in men, and my hesitation ruins everything. Dana is already smiling over my shoulder, greeting a new arrival, when the sharply spoken words rattle from behind me like bullets:
“I think we need to talk, Tal.”
I turn in surprise to find myself staring into the angry face of Gerald Nathanson.
“Hello, Jerry,” I say quietly.
“We need to talk,” he says again.
Jerry Nathanson, probably the most prominent lawyer in the city, was in law school with Kimmer and myself, married back then to the same unprepossessing woman who is his wife today. He is perhaps five foot eight, a trifle overweight, with a fleshy chin not quite able to spoil his 1950s-style boyish good looks. His features are clear and even and a little soft. His dark hair is curly, and he is balding, just a bit, in the middle of his head. He is an
