like in those days.”
“What it was like.” Repeating my line, repeating his, the Justice recrosses his long legs and leans back in his chair. He is looking now not at me but at the ceiling, where, perhaps, he is reading the waves and currents of memory. “Well. Yes. You have to remember that, at the time all of this happened, your father was a nominee for the Supreme Court.”
“I know that.”
He catches my impatience and patiently corrects it. “Well, you know and you don’t know. You have to have a sense of what a court is like when one of the judges is headed for the high bench-or when everybody thinks he is headed that way, anyway. I’ve been through that several times. Several times. I was there for Bob Bork. For Oliver Garland. For Doug Ginsburg.” A wry smile. “Of course, when I list the names that way, I guess you could say the odds are not very good from the D.C. Circuit.”
I smile back.
“But, still, even though none of those nominees… ah, none of them prevailed… even so, at the time of the announcement, the atmosphere was, well, special.”
“Special how?” I prompt.
“Well,” says the Justice again. “Well, now, at first, when Reagan announced that he was nominating your father? Nobody was entirely surprised, but, still, there was this… this excitement around the place. Your dad, well, he was always an impressive figure, but, after the news was out, he kind of… when he walked down the hall, into the courtroom, wherever, it was kind of… well, breathtaking, I suppose. Breathtaking. I mean that literally. It was as though he was incandescent, burning the oxygen right out of the air. I don’t know what the word is. Magic, maybe. People did not exactly fawn over him. No. Come to think of it, it was just the opposite. People drew back a little bit, grew… mmmm, let’s say diffident, as though he was being elevated to some higher plane of existence, and the rest of us mortals were no longer fit company. No longer fit. Not a king, but.. . a crown prince! That’s the analogy. There was this… this glow. Incandescent,” he repeats.
I nod, hoping he will get to the point. Wainwright’s judicial opinions have this same scattered quality, full of weak allusions and awkward metaphors. Law professors reward him for this literary confusion by referring to his writing as stylish. But perhaps my own tendency to drabness makes me envious.
“Well. Your father handled it all beautifully. We might have been diffident, the other judges, and, especially, the law clerks, but your father was as friendly as always.” Another smile, soft, reminiscing, and I wonder whether he is teasing, for the Judge was many things, some of them admirable, but none of them friendly. “You know, now that I think about it, I suppose your father had a lot of time to prepare himself, to think about how he would behave if lightning struck. You might remember that it was not exactly a surprise. Your dad was one of the finalists, it was in all the papers, and, besides, people were talking about your dad even back in ’80, right after the election. Yes. Right after the election. Come to think of it, when Reagan was elected, some right-winger or other-excuse me, no offense to your father-but somebody from one of those terribly conservative think tanks was quoted in the newspaper about your father as the possible successor to Justice Marshall. He said something offensive, something like, ‘I hope Thurgood is keeping Oliver’s seat warm.’ Words to that effect.”
I have forgotten the atmosphere of the time, but Justice Wainwright’s tale brings it tumbling back. I even remember, for the first time in years, the quote he mentioned. I was outraged by it, and so was nearly everybody else I knew, including my father. Outraged by the presumption, for instance, that there could be only one black Justice at a time. And by the presumption that the speaker was on a first-name basis with both my father and the great Thurgood Marshall. And then the racist choice-there is no other way to put it-to call both jurists by their first names. I cannot recall any similar quote along the lines of “I hope Lewis is keeping Bob’s seat warm”-not when the Justice and the potential nominee were both white. My father, for a strange, shining, sacrificial moment, pondered removing himself from all consideration as a future member of the Court, out of respect for Justice Marshall, before flaring ambition triumphed once more.
“I remember,” is all I say now.
“It was a terrible thing to say, Misha, a terrible thing, and your father was furious. But, well, this Court… there’s been a circus atmosphere around the nominations for decades. Longer. It goes back at least to Brandeis. Maybe even to Salmon Chase, or Roger Taney. Of course you know the storms their nominations caused! Well, this is getting far afield, and I know I’m boring you. You didn’t want to know about the mood around the courthouse. You know it already. You wanted to know… well, about your dad around this time, right?”
“Yes. Whatever you feel you can share.”
“Mmmm.” Wainwright has unveiled a different nervous gesture. He is worrying his retreating hair with one hand, drumming the fingers of the other on the arm of the chair. Doing both at once is actually a rather impressive display of coordination, like the juggler who also dances on a ball. “I’ll tell you, Misha, your father, as I said… he was incandescent. But not always. Even before the scandal broke, there were times, when I would catch Oliver at an unguarded moment, when he seemed… strained, I suppose, is the word. Worried about something. Yes. We would meet in the judges’ elevator and he would look tense and I would ask him what was wrong. I would remind him he should be walking on air. Yes. And he would shrug and mutter about how anything can come out in these hearings. ‘Look at Fortas,’ he said one night when we went down to the garage together. ‘The man takes perfectly legal money from a foundation and they destroy him for it.’” Wainwright twists his mouth in prim distaste. “Not that the problem with Fortas was legality, of course. He took money from… well, a shady character.” Then he sits up straight. “I guess I see the comparison.”
I am stunned. “You’re not saying… my father didn’t…”
“Take money? Oh, no, no, nothing like that. I’m sorry, Misha, I didn’t mean to leave that impression.” Wainwright actually laughs. “Your father taking money. That’s a real joke. I know there were some nasty rumors about that, but I knew your father as well as anybody, I sat with him on, literally, hundreds of cases over the years. I would have known. We all would have known. No chance. None. What a silly idea. I am only trying to explain that your father was nervous, that he thought something would come out, something perfectly innocent that would be distorted into something completely different.”
“Did you have any idea, at the time, what that something might be?”
“No, no. How could I? Your father was-what’s the old phrase?-oh, yes, a man of transparent rectitude. An impeccable resume, a wonderful marriage, fine children. An exemplary career. Nobody would have imagined that scandal could attach itself to such a man. Your father was a great man, Misha, no matter what happened. You have to bear his greatness in mind.”
He is trying to reassure me, I know, but I find his cockiness off-putting. On the day of the funeral, Mallory Corcoran, too, spoke of my father’s greatness, and I sensed he meant the past tense. I wonder now whether Wallace Wainwright means the same thing. For a difficult moment, it bothers me, Wainwright’s smugness. Bothers me, I know full well, because he is white and untouchable. Was the Judge this smug? Would he have been as smug had he been confirmed? Yes, I suppose he was, and, yes, I suppose he would have been, except that he would have behaved even worse. But it would have been different. And not because he is-was-my father. After all the painful centuries, there is still a gap, a gulf, a yawning chasm between the smugness of a successful white man and the smugness of a successful black man. I suppose that white folk must find the first far easier to bear. Not black folk, however. Not this one, at least.
Yet I must press on to my point. I am not here to judge Wallace Wainwright. I am here to gather information. I am here because of the arrangements. Because there is little time. Because I have to know.
“Justice Wainwright, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to ask you about what happened… um, after the scandal broke.”
“By all means.” He settles his hands over his knee, looking for all the world like an alert schoolboy. But his generosity seems forced, as though I am opening a wound, and perhaps I am.
“Do you remember the security logs from the hearings? How they registered all those visits from Jack Ziegler?”
He nods slowly. “I wish I didn’t. It was a sad moment.”
If it was sad for you, I almost say, think of how it felt for us. Until the logs showed up, I suppose I mostly believed my father’s denials, under oath, of Jack Ziegler’s visits. I was quite ready to accept that Greg Haramoto
