I know who Angela’s boyfriend is.
We make the nervous drive over to Darien, and I move into Mariah’s guest house. By the next day, I am a member of her household. For two weeks, I eat healthy meals prepared by her cook, walk the well-tended grounds, and swim in the heated indoor free-form pool, the rest and food and exercise building up my strength. I coo sincerely over the new arrival. I telephone Bentley every morning and every night. I play with my sister’s disorderly children and, in the evenings, listen to her disorderly theories as she flips through the channels looking for another game show. Howard is almost never around, either spending the night in the city or flying off to the other side of the world. So we sit there, Mariah and I, on the imported brushed-leather sofa in the forty-foot family room of the nine-thousand-square-foot manor house. All the furnishings are so perfectly arranged that the children are allowed to visit very little of the first floor. It is like living in a magazine layout, and, indeed, Mariah says sadly that the designer submitted photographs to Architectural Digest, but nothing came of it. Her tone suggests that this is a genuine defeat.
I watch my sister, the best of us all, soldier her way through her loneliness in the midst of all this wealth while the au pair raises the children and the cook prepares the meals and cleans up afterward and the gardener comes by every other day to tend the plants and cut the grass and the cleaning service drops in twice a week so everything sparkles and the accountant calls every few days to discuss a bill that just came in-it occurs to me that Mariah really has nothing to do. She and Howard have purchased every service that middle-class folk like myself assume adults are supposed to perform. Apart from regular breast-feedings of little Mary, shopping and watching television and decorating are all she has left. So I start taking her out: to the movies, to the mall, hobbling on my cane around an art exhibit in the city while we push Mary in a stroller and two or three more of her children gambol in our wake. Mariah is too restless to take much interest. I try to talk to her: about the latest Washington scandal or the new Toni Morrison, because Toni Morrison has been her favorite author ever since The Bluest Eye. I ask after her children, but she shrugs and says they are right there if I want to see how they are doing. I ask how her golf lessons are going, and she shrugs and says it is still way too cold. Recalling what Sally said about how she and Mariah liked to go to clubs together, I offer to take my sister out to listen to some jazz, but she says she is not in the mood. Nothing draws her. She seems too unhappy to bother being depressed.
One afternoon, a couple of my sister’s Fairfield County friends drop by, wealthy white wives she knows from one country club or another, with the coerced skinniness of personal training and the gossipy languor of lives as empty as Mariah’s. Sitting listlessly in the sunroom, with its shiny silver-and-white tiles, sipping lemonade because it is there, they gaze at me in frank curiosity, even a little uneasiness-not, I finally realize, because I have been shot, but because I am a member of the darker nation. It is as though, in order to accept Mariah into their secret circle, they have schooled themselves to forget that she is black, and I am playing the role of the ghost at their elegant little banquet, calling them to remember an inconvenient fact they have cast aside.
I wonder whether their lapse into agnosia counts as racial progress.
Sometimes, late at night, Mariah sits in the library and logs on to AOL-the response time is very fast, for she and Howard have invested in a T-1 line-and chats with friends around the world. I watch as instant messages pop up: in cyberspace, at least, she does not appear to be lonely, and perhaps the very anonymity of the chat room is a part of what attracts her to it. She knows a few conspiracy theorists, it seems, and although she has never told them who she is, they have shared all manner of “information” about the way the Judge “really” died. She shows me a chat room dedicated to nothing else. I try to follow the conversation, which ranges over witnesses I know were not present and evidence I know does not exist. I nod sagely and wish I could see inside her tortured brain. Mariah is pressing, her refusal to face facts intentional. She continues to babble about the autopsy, even though she knows as well as I that two pathologists and a photographic analyst hired by Corcoran amp; Klein agreed with the medical examiner that the specks are only dirt on the lens. Mariah tells me she has e-mailed the photographs to cyberfriends around the world. It occurs to me to ask whether any of those friends are hiding out in Argentina, but she only smiles.
Howard is home for dinner once or twice a week, and as I get to know him, I warm to him. He seems incompetent at dealing with their many children, but his complete devotion to my sister reassures me. After dinner, Howard usually works out in a room set aside for that purpose, full of all the latest equipment, and he invites me to join him. Watching him pump, I realize that Howard Denton is, after all, nothing but a grown-up child with a talent for making money. He talks about his work because he does not know what else one talks about. Mariah is plainly tired of his stories of merger fights; I find them fascinating. Listening, I remember, with more sentiment than I would have guessed, my days as a practicing lawyer. I wonder whether Kimmer and I would have married had I remained in D.C. rather than fleeing to Elm Harbor.
In my plentiful spare time, I hunt through the boxes of notes and documents Mariah has stored in one of the six bedrooms of the main house, the fruits of her many trips to Shepard Street. Almost everything is useless junk, but a couple of items catch and hold my interest. In a file she has labeled UNFINISHED CORRESPONDENCE? I discover handwritten drafts of several letters, including four efforts at a note to Uncle Mal resigning from the firm, dated around the last Thanksgiving of the Judge’s life, eleven months before he died, and a fragment of a note of apology addressed only to “G”- I do not know whether you will believe me when I tell you I am heartily sorry for the pain you have endured because of your simple and unadorned love of -at which point the note simply stops. I show this one to my sister, who, pleased by my interest, explains that it was intended for Gigi Walker, which I do not believe for a second. I do not think Mariah believes it either. If the Judge intended to follow the of by the truth or by justice, the letter could as well be addressed to Greg Haramoto. But when I call his family’s importing firm in Los Angeles, I am told that Greg is on an extended overseas trip and cannot be reached. I ask for his voice mail and his e-mail address. After checking with somebody, the receptionist refuses to give me either.
As we sit up watching Letterman late one night, I tell Mariah what I am thinking and she agrees, reluctantly, to share with me her own speculations: that Wallace Wainwright may have been correct, that our father wanted to get caught at whatever he was up to. Nothing else could explain why he would invite Jack Ziegler, facing trial for murder and extortion, to meet him at the federal courthouse, where, even in the dead of night, witnesses were bound to see him and records were bound to be kept. Maybe he just wanted out at any price. Maybe, says Mariah, he hoped that if he was hanged for meeting with his old roommate nobody would look deeply enough to penetrate to what was really going on. If the second was true, the grand juries that were convened probably shook him severely.
“Suppose he was fixing cases,” says Mariah, sadly.
“Justice Wainwright says he wasn’t,” I point out, the last ray of hope.
“Justice Wainwright isn’t psychic. Suppose Daddy was fixing cases and found a way to hide it from his buddy. Maybe, after the hearings, he went to Jack Ziegler and said he could not continue to do… whatever he was doing… under these conditions, and Jack talked to his partners, and they agreed to let him resign. Or maybe he resigned on his own. Either way, he finally had an out.”
I consider this. “If Greg’s testimony was no surprise, the letter might make sense.”
My sister nods. “If it was intended for Greg, then Daddy was a superb actor. If it was intended for Gigi, well, we’re better off not knowing.”
True enough. But, thinking about it, I am sure Mariah is right about Greg. Then all those long nights of deep depression that Lanie Cross reported, when my father would talk about the wreck of his career, when he asked whatever happened to loyalty, he was not blaming Greg: he was blaming Jack. He allowed Greg to take the fall, in effect, but that, too, was part of the fiction. If Mariah is right, if the Judge was fixing cases for Jack Ziegler and friends after all, then to admit that Greg was telling the truth might have been the signature on his death warrant, or his family’s. But that answer seems insufficiently to capture what must have been the complexity of the moment. The Judge probably wondered whether he should have given it all up, whether he did the right thing when he sabotaged his own nomination to the Supreme Court. Some of his hatred for Greg Haramoto was probably genuine.
Then the baby starts to cry, and Mariah has to run off. In the morning, she will talk of the Judge no more. How he died, she desires passionately to discover. How he lived, she would rather not know.
On the Friday, my wife drives Bentley down for a visit, explaining to me in great detail how to take care of him, the way estranged spouses do. She pecks me on the lips and pats me on the back. She oohs and aahs over
