waiting to be impressed. Nothing has provoked a response. I know he can see my frustration, but it fails to move him.
I ponder. From what Wainwright told me, it is plain that the Judge felt burdened by his perfidy. He had ascended to the bench to do justice, not to remain in thrall forever to criminals. No doubt the special favors went on and on and on. Perhaps, as illegal money found its way into legal businesses, the pace increased. Who knows what stocks are in the Mob’s portfolio? When the Supreme Court nomination suddenly came his way, Jack Ziegler’s partners were surely ecstatic. My father was surely worried. Maybe the truth would come out, and he would be ruined. And then perhaps he had another idea. Maybe the truth should come out, and he could escape the hell into which he had sold himself.
“Which is where Greg Haramoto comes in,” I say, but the words prompt no reaction. “I tried to talk to Greg, but he wouldn’t.”
Uncle Mal, a ghostly smile of reminiscence on his lips, finally makes an independent contribution: “I’m not surprised, the way your sister talked about him on television back during those very sad hearings. What was it she accused him of?”
“Of having a crush on the Judge.”
“That’s right. You know, people don’t forget things like that, Talcott.”
“I’m not criticizing Greg. I just want you to understand that I’m still just guessing.”
“I never doubted it.” He is on his feet, and I know the interview is over. “Everything you have said is guesswork. You can’t know for sure if any of it is true.”
“I realize that.” We are walking toward my car. I had thought he would invite me to stay for lunch, but Uncle Mal has his ways, and his vacation time is sacrosanct. I suppose I should be grateful he has spared me this precious half-hour from whatever it is that big lawyers do when they own farms in the country. I cannot quite envision him milking a cow, although I seem to recall that he has a dairy herd hidden somewhere.
Uncle Mal is holding the door for me. “You know, Talcott, guessing is not always a terrible thing. Sometimes I do a little guessing of my own.”
I stand very still, not daring to look at him. Around the side of the house, Edie and the kids are singing a song. The cats and dogs, most of them hideously fat, are now somnolent in the summer sun.
“I would guess that some of what you say could be true.” His voice is soft, and a little sad. “Could be, Talcott, could be. And I would also guess that, when your father came to me and left me his letter and told me about the arrangements, he told me he was thinking of quitting the firm. If I were a guessing man, I would speculate that he was scared, that something out of his past had caught up with him. He wasn’t scared of death, I don’t think. If I had to guess, I would say he was scared of exposure. Something was going to come out.”
I turn around finally. “The arrangements… all this… wasn’t this about exposure?”
“On his own terms.”
“What are you telling me?”
The weatherproof smile. “I’m not telling you anything, Talcott. You know I would never disclose a confidence. I’m only speculating.”
“Okay… so what are you speculating?”
“I am speculating that your father was planning to hide the information he wanted you to have, and then commit suicide.”
CHAPTER 59
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dear Dana Worth.
“What is?”
“That your father would commit suicide.”
I shrug. “That’s what he said.”
Dana steams, not quite ready to accept my speculations about the man she once so adored, to say nothing of Mallory Corcoran’s. We are strolling together along the bluestone walks of the Original Quad, which, nearly empty of students in the summer, can actually be quite pleasant. We have been seeing more of each other these days, although not, of course, romantically. We are both having what my parents used to call “trouble at home.” My wife, proclaiming her love for me, has thrown me out, and Alison is angry at Dana these days for worrying so much about whether what they are doing is right. Alison wants Dana to stop hanging out at her little Methodist church with what she calls the right-wing homophobes, and Dana refuses, saying they are good Christian people and she wants to listen to their point of view. Alison asks if black people are obliged to worship with white supremacists, to get their point of view. Dana says it isn’t the same at all. I am not about to get in the middle. Dana is stoic enough to qualify as an honorary Garland, but, when our various pains leak through our facades, we friends do our best to comfort each other.
“Suicide,” Dana sneers again.
“It does happen, Dana. People do stupid things.” One of our shared pains is that Theo Mountain suffered a massive stroke two days ago and is not expected to live. I want to blame the Judge, I want to blame Theo, but I cannot help blaming myself: was I too hard on the old man?
“So, the story is supposed to be that your father was going to kill himself because he was scared of being exposed? And then you were supposed to track down his arrangements and he would get his revenge?”
“Something like that.”
“Sorry, Misha, that doesn’t make any sense at all. No matter what kind of man your father really was. If some reporter or somebody was going to expose him, why would the fact that he was dead make them stop? A dead man can’t even sue for defamation.”
“I’m not sure it was that kind of exposure. Not public.”
“What’s the other kind?”
“Maybe somebody was threatening to tell his family what he had been doing.”
“But why? What would that somebody want from him? And why would that somebody stop just because he was dead?”
I shake my head in frustration, still chewing on cotton, still sure of the existence, out there somewhere, of an interested party who has not been fooled. The only thing I can think of that somebody might want badly enough to threaten my father is the one thing I have not yet found: the arrangements. “I don’t know,” I confess.
Dana sighs, exasperated, maybe toward me. We continue through the empty Quad, where, in my student days, I used to walk with the Judge, who would reminisce for a while, then drag me along to drop in on those of his old professors who were still living, and those of his classmates who were now on the faculty. He would introduce me airily to my own teachers as though they had never seen me before, never embarrassed me in class, never commanded me to redo fifty-page papers in three days, and they fussed over me because they fawned over him; even then, my father had the magic that enraptured, the presence that demanded respect, and, besides, with Reagan in the White House, every one of them knew that the Honorable Oliver Garland would sit on the Supreme Court of the United States the instant that a vacancy occurred. When the visiting was done, I would drive the Judge to the lilliputian Elm Harbor airport in my shabby but earnest Dodge Dart, and we would sit in the coffee shop and eat stale Danish while waiting out the inevitable delay of the small commuter plane that would carry him back to Washington, and, to pass the time, he would bombard me once more with newer versions of the same old questions, as though hoping for a different set of answers-how were my grades, when would I hear about law review, whom was I dating these days-and, invariably, I was tempted to lie about the first two and tell the truth about the third, if only to see the look on his face, and to make him leave me alone.
By then, of course, he was already Jack Ziegler’s judicial drone, so his desperate hopes for me, which I resented, take on a pathetic yet lovingly ambitious quality: he wanted his son the lawyer to wind up in a different place.
“Misha?” Dana has another question. “Misha, why would Jack Ziegler do it?”
“Do what? Let him out of the deal? Let him retire?”
