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.
“Paygrown now now now!” Bentley calls. “Dare you!”
“One minute!” I shout back, still puzzling over the letter. How am I to locate Angela’s boyfriend, who is in deteriorating condition? Does that mean that the man I should be talking to is sick? Perhaps dying? Is that why I have little time? I know who the others are, who would also like to know, having met a pair of them, but I do not understand why the Judge is at such pains to assure me that my family is in no danger, the fourth such reassurance I have received in the past month: first Jack Ziegler, then McDermott, next Agent Nunzio, now my late father.
I shake my head.
I try to think of famous Angelas: Lansbury? Bassett? I do not know enough about them to know if they even have husbands, still less boyfriends-and, anyway, my father did not exactly run with the Hollywood crowd. I have already had my secretary search the student directory at the law school: three Angelas, one black, two white, none of whom I have ever had in class or have any reason to think my father knew. Maybe there is a way to put together a list of all the Angelas my father might have met, but not without involving somebody official-Uncle Mal, for instance-or somebody who knows lots of the Judge’s friends-Mariah, for instance-and I cannot quite imagine sharing the note with either of them.
Not yet.
Little time.
I almost smile. The phrase explains nothing about Angela’s boyfriend, but a good deal about the Judge. He used those words often in his speeches, in trying to explain to his friends in the Rightpacs why they needed… well, racial diversity. The median American, he loved to tell his eager audiences, is socially conservative. The median black American, the Judge would add, is even more conservative. Look at the data on any question, he would rumble. School prayer? Black Americans favor it more than whites do. Abortion? Black Americans are more pro-life than whites. Vouchers? Black Americans support them more strongly than whites. Gay rights? Black Americans are more skeptical than whites. The applause would roll across his (overwhelmingly white) audience. Then he would hit them with the big windup: Conservatives are the last people who can afford to be racist. Because the future of conservatism is black America! They would go wild for him. I never saw it in person, but I saw it, often, on C-SPAN. And whichever Rightpac he was speaking to would march out to try to recruit black members, because, he would insist, there is little time… and, almost always, the recruitment effort would fail… quite abysmally. Because there were a few little details the Judge always left out. Like the fact that it was conservatives who fought against just about every civil rights law ever proposed. Like the fact that many of the wealthy men who paid for his expensive speeches would not have him in their clubs. Like the fact that it was the great conservative hero Ronald Reagan who kicked off his campaign by talking about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a location with a certain wicked resonance for the darker nation, and who, as President, backed tax exemptions for the South’s many segregation academies. The Judge was surely right to insist that the time has come for black Americans to stop trusting white liberals, who are far more comfortable telling us what we need than asking us what we want, but he never did come up with a particularly persuasive reason for us to start trusting white conservatives instead.
My father trusted them, however, and they trusted him right back. I wander into the dining room, where the long wooden table could easily seat fourteen or more and, during my childhood, often did. On the long wall of the room is a crumbling brick fireplace which has been unusable for as long as I can remember. Above the hearth hangs an enlarged version of my father’s treasured Newsweek cover the week after his nomination was announced. THE CONSERVATIVE HOUR, reads the caption, and, in smaller type, A New Direction on the Court? Well, yes, the answer might be-yes, there was a new direction on the Court, but my father was not destined to be one of its leaders. I examine the picture. The Judge looks bold, handsome, smart, ready for anything. He looks alive. In those days, for some reason, the press decided to like him; but you should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun. And suddenly, instead of fame, you have infamy; instead of a life of public service, you have a life of private bitterness; and you turn your house into a museum of what might have been. Again I recall my father’s nostalgic phrase: the way it was before. My family’s habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future? There is no going back, and the Judge, of all people, should have known better than to change his vacation home, his hideaway, his place of respite, into a shrine to his shattered dreams. Kimmer, I know, is waiting for a suitable moment to let me know that it is time to remove this and the other selfcongratulatory emblems scattered around Vinerd Howse, to bury them in the attic with my old baseball-card collection and Abby’s stuffed animals-
“Paygrown now!” Bentley announces from the doorway to the kitchen, stomping his foot. I look up at him, ready to be angry, and smile instead. He is wearing his midnight-blue parka and has even pulled his sneakers onto the wrong feet. He is dragging my wind-breaker behind him. Oh, how I love this child!
“Okay, sweetheart.” I fold my father’s letter, return it to the envelope, and slip it into my pocket. “Paygrown now.”
Bentley jumps up and down. “Paygrown! Dare you! Wuv you!”
“Wuv you, too.” I hug him and kneel down to fix his shoes, and, of course, the phone immediately starts to ring.
Don’t answer it, Bentley tells me with his earnest, judgmental brown eyes, for he does not yet know how to say the words. Please, Daddy, don’t answer it. And at first, I consider ignoring the phone. After all, it is most likely Cassie Meadows calling from Washington, or Mariah calling from Darien, or Not-McDermott calling from Canada. On the other hand, it might be Kimmer with good news, or Kimmer with bad, Kimmer to say she loves me, or Kimmer to say she doesn’t.
It might be Kimmer.
“Just one quick minute,” I say to my son, who eyes me with the sort of hopeless disappointment that some psychiatrist in his future will doubtless unearth. “It’s probably Mommy.”
Only it isn’t.
