lawyers believe). I shake my head, trying and failing to envision my father in this magnificent office, had things gone otherwise. A wave of fatalism sweeps over me, the sense that nothing anybody could have done would have changed the inevitable outcome.
Nothing.
Wallace Wainwright, with his fine political eye, notices my uneasiness, puts a hand on my elbow, and directs me to a plush blue sofa. He perches on a hard wooden chair standing catercorner to it. Over his shoulder, through the high window, is a view of the Capitol building, its massive dome dull gray in the unkempt drizzle that is so predictable a part of a Washington December. Despite the weather, I revel in the delicious independence of the truant. I am playing hooky this wet afternoon from the conference on tort reform that is paying the expenses for my visit to the city; I am insufficiently grand to be missed. Yet, now that I am seated in Wainwright’s chambers, the appointment arranged by Rob Saltpeter, who clerked for Wainwright years ago, I try to figure out how to begin. I fidget like a nervous first-year student forced unwillingly to recite a case.
Wallace Wainwright waits. And waits. He can afford to wait, or not to wait, as he likes. He knows who he is. He sits at the summit of the legal world and has nobody left to impress. His suit is mousy and shapeless and brown, more what you find in the secondhand shops down in Southeast than what you expect a Supreme Court Justice to wear. His old narrow tie is askew. His blue shirt is poorly pressed and unevenly tucked. Despite his impressive name, Wallace Wainwright comes, as the Judge used to say in some astonishment, from no particular background. The Wainwright family, again according to my father, was Tennessee trailer trash. Wallace, the middle brother among five, lied and cajoled and borrowed his way through UT, attended Vanderbilt’s law school on a scholarship, and, in his early years of law practice, sent half his paycheck home, sometimes more if somebody from his vastly extended family needed surgery or the down payment for a car. Yet nowadays he lives in a small but pricey row house in Georgetown, with a huge country place for the weekends, twenty-five acres with horses for his daughters to ride, out near the town of Washington, sometimes called “Little Washington,” in the middle of the Virginia hunt country. My father used to shake his head, bemused that his onetime colleague married rather well.
Associate Justice Wallace Warrenton Wainwright, the intellectual giant.
The man of the people.
The darling of the legal academy.
The last of the great liberal judges.
And the closest thing my father had to a friend when they sat together on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the real reason I have come. Despite their marked ideological differences, the two men were united in the belief that their minds were greater than those of the other judges on the court, a condescension not infrequently reflected in their dissenting opinions. It occurs to me that a court can be a little like a law school, or at least like mine. There are tiers, at least in the minds of those who assign themselves to the highest one. Judges Garland and Wainwright believed themselves to occupy a tier of their own, much to the resentment, so I have heard from Eddie Dozier, of the rest of the court. Although my father was perhaps a decade older than Wainwright, they used to pal around outside the courthouse too, playing golf and poker and fishing a bit, back before scandal destroyed my father’s career. Even afterward, Wainwright tried to keep in touch, but eventually-so Addison has told me-the strain on my father was too much. The Judge was sitting still, even tumbling downward, and his old friend Wallace was still climbing the ladder. When the Democrats recaptured the White House, everybody knew that Wainwright would fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Everybody was right.
We sit in silence a moment longer, as I try to force myself to press forward. But the depression that has characterized the past couple of months has seized me once more, slowing my reason, increasing my doubts and fears. This morning I dropped by Corcoran amp; Klein, where Meadows, as promised, let me look around my father’s empty corner office just down the hall from Uncle Mal’s. Mrs. Rose, who was the Judge’s assistant forever, is long gone, retired and moved to Phoenix. The room itself was truly empty: after the new carpet, repainting, and drapes, not even the Judge’s ghost would be hanging around. But the inspection was just for show. I really dropped in to buy Cassie Meadows a cup of coffee so that I could have her undivided attention and watch her spontaneous reaction when I asked her whether my father had left behind one of those if-anything-should-happen-to-me notes.
Meadows never flinched. She thought it over, tapping a long finger against nearly invisible lips. “If he did, I wouldn’t be privy to it. That kind of thing would be more Mr. Corcoran’s department than mine.”
The response I expected. I knew the answer to my next question before I asked it: No, Mr. Corcoran isn’t in. He’s away in Europe for a few weeks.
“It’s good of you to see me,” I begin, feeling awkward and childish in the face of this physical, human reminder of all my ambitious father sought to attain… and failed to achieve.
“Nonsense,” Wallace Wainwright huffs, with a surreptitious look at his watch-a Timex for the man of the people-before settling in his uncomfortable chair, crossing his bony legs, folding his large hands on his knee, which he at once begins to jiggle. “I’m just sorry we haven’t had the chance to sit down in so long.”
“It has been a long time,” I agree.
“How’s your lovely wife?” the Justice asks, even though I am fairly sure he has never laid eyes on Kimmer in his life. He is famous for a twisted, kindly smile, and he displays it now. Learned articles have been written on its significance. “I understand you have a couple of children now. Or is it just the one?”
“Just Bentley. He’s three.”
“A wonderful age,” he says, filling the time with these irrelevancies. I do not know whether he is trying to put me at my ease or to put me off. “I remember when mine were three. Well, not all at once,” he adds pedantically. “But I remember each of them.”
“You have three children? Is that what I remember?”
“Four,” he corrects me gently, ending my effort to show that I, too, am a social being. “All girls,” he muses. “An intriguing variety of ages.”
Still he waits.
Nowhere to go but forward.
“Mr. Justice, I wanted to talk to you, if you are willing, about my father.” He raises his eyebrows in gentle inquisition, and waits some more. “About those last couple of years he spent on the bench. Before… well, before what happened.”
“Of course, Misha, of course.” Charming as ever. Years ago, honoring his friendship with my father, I invited Wainwright to call me by my nickname, and he has never stopped. “Those were difficult years. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for you, and I am so sorry about it all.”
“Thank you, Mr. Justice. I know what your friendship meant to the
… to my father.”
Justice Wainwright smiles again. “Oh, well, he was a very special man. He meant a great deal to me. A giant, an absolute giant. The finest judicial craftsman it has ever been my privilege to know. I suppose you would have to say he was my mentor on the bench. Yes. What happened… well, it does nothing to alter my admiration for him.” A pause, now that he has made his little speech. “Yes. So. What would you like to know?”
Here goes. “Well, I was wondering… not about the days after what happened, but the days before. When he was nominated in the first place. Around then. What was going on. Including what was, or wasn’t, going on with Jack Ziegler.”
“You know, it’s interesting. Interesting. Nobody has asked me about any of this, not even when the Congress”- the is his affectation, as are the studied repetitions and pauses that give him time to think-“was doing all those investigations. A few reporters, I guess, who somehow wangled my home number. Reporters. Of course I didn’t talk to them.” Like most judges, Wallace Wainwright regards journalists in the way that the human body probably views the E. coli bacterium: you know you need a little of it for everything to work right, but you still kind of keep hoping somebody will kill it off. “There’s been a great silence about your father, Misha. A silence. Yes. I mean about what it was like in the courthouse in those days. And maybe that’s best.”
I hesitate. Is he warning me away or drawing me in? I do not know. I cannot read the signs. So I press my own agenda instead. “That’s what I want to know, I guess. What it was like in the courthouse. What my father was
