composition book where she has sketched her theories and drawn her connections. My ledger, she called it in one late-night call. Next to my family, the most precious thing I own. Looking around at the chaos that Mariah thinks is orderly, I worry. Surely Arthur Bremer’s apartment once looked as the attic now does. And John Hinckley’s. And Squeaky Fromme’s. I have had a few chats with Howard, who tells me that he is starting to worry about his wife, that he never sees her, she is down in Washington nearly every weekend. She often takes the children, too, sometimes bundling all five of them, along with the au pair of the moment-she fires them fast-into the Navigator for the rumble down the New Jersey Turnpike. Marshall and Malcolm are old enough to help a little with the sorting, but the twins only play, and Marcus, soon to relinquish his role as the baby, naps in my sister’s old bedroom on the second floor, watched over by the au pair, who rarely speaks English, at least to me.
Usually, when Mariah calls after a few days in the attic, we fight. The conversation always begins the same way. She whispers unhappily of her discoveries, always things I would rather not know-an ancient love letter to the Judge from a woman whose name neither of us quite recognizes, an award from his college fraternity for victory in a drinking contest, a note in his appointment book to meet some Senator whose politics make her ill. My sister sets great store by such artifacts. She believes that she is reconstructing our father, that she will learn from his simulacrum a deeper truth he kept hidden from us. That his shade lives on amidst the flotsam and jetsam of his written life, and that it will finally speak. I try to tell her that these are just worthless scraps of paper, that we should discard them, but I am speaking to a woman whose five-million-dollar home is decorated almost entirely with photographs of her unprepossessing children, and whose sentimentality, as Kimmer once observed, would lead her to save her children’s soiled diapers if she could only think of a way to do it neatly. I gently suggest to my stubborn sister that we did not understand our father when he was alive, and we will not understand him any better now that he is dead, but Mariah, alone among the children of Claire and Oliver Garland, has never conceded that there are things beyond her understanding, which is doubtless why she was the only one of us to earn straight A’s in college. I try to tell her that we certainly will not come to know the Judge through his papers, but Mariah remains a journalist at her core, with a master’s degree in history, and my words are a challenge to her faith. So, in the end, unable to bear another dramatic reading from a request for a zoning variance to enable installation of a nonconforming septic system at Vinerd Howse, I always tell her that I have problems of my own, and she snaps back that blood is thicker than water, which was one of our mother’s favorite phrases, and which Mariah repeats often, even if she claimed as a child to hate it. My sister and I are talking more often than in the past, but, truce or no truce, we get along as badly as we ever did.
Consequently, when she tells me that she has found something we need to talk about, I brace myself for the worst-meaning the most useless, boring, trivial. Or the scariest-more talk of bullet fragments, which, lately, she has not mentioned. Or the most likely-she has heard about the death of McDermott/Scott, and wants to explain how it fits into the conspiracy.
What actually comes out of her mouth, therefore, takes me by surprise.
“Tal, did you know Daddy owned a gun?”
“A gun?”
“Yes, a gun. As in a handgun. I found it last night, in the bedroom, in the back of a drawer. I was just looking for papers, and I found this gun. It was in a box, with… well, with some bullets. But that’s not why I called.” She pauses, presumably for dramatic effect, but there is no need: she has my full attention. “Tal, I had somebody look at it this afternoon. An expert? It’s been fired, Tal. Recently.”
CHAPTER 19
“The District of Columbia probably has the strictest gun law in the country,” Lemaster Carlyle assures me. “It’s pretty much impossible to obtain a permit there.” Pause. “On the other hand, Virginia is right across the river, and it is one of the easiest places in the civilized world to purchase a legal handgun. People buy them there and take them everywhere.”
“Huh,” is my thoughtful contribution.
“So, if a relative of mine who lived in D.C. died and left a gun behind”-in his teasing Barbadian lilt, he is tossing my transparent hypothetical back at me-“my guess would be that he purchased it in Virginia and simply ignored the District’s laws. Plenty of people do.”
I nod slowly, my half-finished grilled-chicken sandwich, the specialty of the house at Post, gone cold and chewy. Lemaster is a former prosecutor and knows about these things, but his information dovetails with my intuition. Once again, my father seems to have lived on the edge of the law. I would rather uncover fewer of these distressing tidbits of information, but I cannot seem to stop looking for them.
“You have to turn the gun in, of course.”
“What?”
“The gun. It is still unregistered and unlicensed. Nobody can legally possess it. It has to be turned in.”
“Oh.” Lemaster Carlyle is a person of sufficient integrity that I suspect this would be his advice even had he not spent three years as an Assistant United States Attorney before turning to the academic world. I watch him pick at his shrimp salad. He never seems to eat very much, never seems to gain an ounce of weight. His suits always fit perfectly. He is a small man with a huge mind, a few years older than I, a Harvard Law School graduate who was also in his day a divinity student before joining our ranks. His smooth, lean face, at once playful and wise, is a rich West Indian purple-black. His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself. They live in one of our tonier suburbs with their four perfect children. He stands miles above me in the school’s unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician. Although he calls himself a progressive, Lem has voted Republican the last few elections, citing the Democratic Party’s opposition to school vouchers, which he sees as the only hope for the children of the inner city. He was cofounder and, for all I know, sole member of a forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush. His pithy, closely reasoned op-eds dot the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. He seems to be on television every five minutes. He is also said to be restless. Many of our colleagues are begging him to wait patiently to succeed Lynda Wyatt, becoming our first black dean, but the rumor mill reports that Lem has grown as bored with the academy as he has with most things he has conquered, and will soon be leaving us for a full-time position at one of the television networks. At the Judge’s funeral, people made a great fuss over him. I often wish I could like Lemaster more, and envy him less.
“And if the person who found the gun didn’t turn it in?” I press.
He sips his water-nobody claims ever to have seen him drink anything else-and shakes his slender head. His small eyes smile at me above a thin mustache. “Finding it is not a crime. Possessing it is a crime.”
So I will advise my sister to turn it in. Case closed.
Except that Lemaster Carlyle levers it back open. “This relative of yours, Talcott-do you know why he thought he needed a gun?”
“No.”
“Most people buy them for self-protection, even people who buy them illegally. But some of course are purchased in order to commit crimes.”
“Okay.”
He dabs at his lips with the paper napkin, then folds it carefully before depositing it on the table, next to his plate. He has eaten perhaps four bites. “If it were a relative of mine, I would not be interested in where he got the gun, or what could happen to me for possessing it. I would be interested in learning why he bought it in the first place.”
Back inside oldie, heading for the central staircase, I pretend to myself for a silly moment that I want to put
