I remember one oral argument, an appeal of some kind of criminal conviction, in which the lawyer for the convicted man made the mistake of playing to your father’s vanity, quoting some dissenting opinion your father wrote in his early days on the bench. Your father asked him, ‘Counsel, do you know how many times that issue has come before this court since I wrote those words?’ The poor man didn’t know. Your father said, ‘Seventeen times. Do you know how many times the court has rejected that approach? Seventeen times. And do you know how many of those opinions I wrote?’ Oh, the wretched lawyer! He did what every first-year law student learns never to do: he guessed. He said, ‘Seventeen, Your Honor?’ Walking right into the trap, you see. Your father said, ‘None. I adhere to the views you quoted,’ and the entire courtroom bursts out laughing. But not the lawyer and not your father. He was not making a joke, he was teaching a lesson. And he couldn’t resist adding a second punch line. ‘My views don’t matter, counsel. In a federal appellate court, you have to cite the law of the circuit, not the views of the individual judges. Perhaps you remember that from law school.’”
I close my eyes briefly. I can easily imagine the Judge using his wit so nastily, because he did it all the time.
Wainwright isn’t finished.
“But, Misha, most of the time, your father’s penchant for details didn’t hurt anybody that way. For instance, whenever a case came before us involving, say, an EPA standard, he would insist on reading the entire rulemaking record himself, instead of leaving it to his law clerks, as most of us would. And we’re talking rulemaking records that could run to more than twenty thousand pages. He would say, ‘If I can read Trollope I can read this.’ Or say there was a case in which one of the parties was obviously a dummy corporation, registered in, say, the Cayman Islands or Netherlands Antilles? Your father would demand that the corporation file-under seal, of course-a list of its actual owners, not just the shells within shells where they were hidden. Or a public interest group? He would require a list of donors.”
I am, in spite of my mission, fascinated. “He could do that?”
“Well, not by himself. It would take an order from the panel hearing the case. Since the panel had three judges, two would have to agree to the request. But it was unanimous, at least in every case I can remember. A matter of intrajudicial courtesy, I suppose.”
“And would the corporations or whatever turn over the records?”
“What else was there to do? Appeal to the Supreme Court? Even assuming that the Justices paid any attention to a request for a stay-which is very unlikely-and assuming they granted it-which is even more unlikely- what would a corporation really have accomplished by the appeal? I’ll tell you. It would have pissed off at least one judge, and maybe two or three. Even if the stay was granted, so the documents or whatever didn’t have to be disclosed, the corporation would still have to go back to the same panel of three judges to have the case heard. So who wants to argue in front of three judges you’ve just made very angry by appealing what seemed to them a pretty innocuous order?” He chuckles softly in delighted reminiscence. “Oh, but he was fun on the bench, your father! And such a fine judge. Such a fine judge.”
But I know what he is really thinking, as I am: Such a waste. Such a waste. Looking at Wainwright’s sad face, I am tempted, for a moment, to ask him if he ever heard my father mention the word Excelsior, or perhaps a woman named Angela, who might have a boyfriend. I wonder if he knew my father owned a gun. Or why he would want one. I cannot quite bring myself to raise these questions, however, perhaps because I would feel too much like… well, the unnamed reporter in Citizen Kane, tracking down “Rosebud.” So I skip to the single question I am really here to ask.
“Justice Wainwright”-I notice that, despite our long family friendship, he has not invited me to call him anything else-“this is. .. this isn’t easy.” He makes a magnanimous gesture. I continue. “A few minutes ago, you made a comment about… uh, money…”
“Let me anticipate you, Misha. You’re wondering the same thing the press wondered for a couple of years after the hearings, if there was anything other than friendship between your father and Jack Ziegler, right? The same thing all those congressional committees wanted to know. You’re asking whether I think your father did little favors on the bench for his old roommate. You’re asking, money aside, if he was a corrupt judge.”
Now that the words have been spoken, they seem less frightening. I can handle the answer. “Yes, sir. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m wondering.”
Justice Wainwright frowns, drums his fingers on the table. He does not so much drop his eyes as cast them toward the right-hand wall, his ego wall, where that photograph of him and the Judge on a fishing trip continues to surprise me, for one would think that a political animal like Wallace Wainwright would have removed it long ago. Then I remember how he offered my father a character reference once the hearings took their painful turn, was willing, even, to testify in person to the Judge’s honesty, no matter what the damage to his own career. My father, although grateful, turned him down flat. But my affection for Wallace Wainwright surges afresh at the recollection.
The Justice continues to ponder. I allow the moment to spin out. His balding head at last swivels in my direction once more, and a smile twitches at the corners of his mouth. “No, Misha. The answer is no. All those investigators, all those committees, all those journalists, none of them ever turned up anything. You have to remember that. They turned up nothing. Not one single thing. The reason is that there was nothing to turn up. Your father was a man of enormous integrity, Misha, as I told you. You mustn’t lose sight of that, no matter what he might have done.” I realize he is referring to his political views, his later career on the speaking circuit, not the scandal. “Please don’t think for a moment that your father was doing anything contrary to judicial ethics. Please don’t think of him as corrupt. Put that right out of your head. Your father would no more have sold his vote on a case than… than”-a pause while he searches for just the right simile, then a mischievous grin to tell me he has found it-“why, than I would,” he finishes with a self-deprecating smile, realizing, perhaps, that he has played perfectly into his own image as moderately egomaniacal.
I am almost done. One last bit of confusion to clear up.
“So, if my father was a man of such integrity and such intelligence”-I hesitate here: did Wainwright actually say at any point that my father was smart? I cannot recall, and, when white intellectuals speak of black ones, the question is of no small importance-“if he was so honest and so smart, then why did he bring Jack Ziegler into the courthouse? He could have met with him anywhere. At home. At a golf resort. In a parking lot. Why take the risk?”
Wainwright’s eyes grow soft and distant, and the sad little smile returns. When at last he speaks, I at first think he is answering a different question from the one I asked, before I realize that he needs to sketch the preamble.
“You know, Misha, I never raised the question of Jack Ziegler with your father. But he raised it with me. We had dinner together, it must have been six or eight months after he… resigned from the bench. Yes. He was, at that point, not yet the… um, angry polemicist he would soon become. He was still in despair. Confused, I think. Yes. Confused. He still could not see how things had turned around on him so swiftly. And he asked me-the only time he ever wanted my advice!-he asked me what I would have done in his place. About Jack Ziegler. I told him I did not know how I would have handled the questions. I guess I was trying to be political. Then I saw I had misunderstood him. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Not the hearing. Earlier. If he was your friend. Would you have abandoned him?’ I realized he was talking about the courthouse visits. And I wondered the same thing you did. I told him that, if I felt I had to meet with a friend who was in trouble, and if there was even a whiff of scandal about the friend, I would do it someplace private. Your father nodded. He seemed very sad. But this is what he said, Misha: ‘I had no choice.’ Something like that. I asked him what he meant, why he had to bring Jack Ziegler into his chambers, but he just shook his head and went on to another subject.” A pause before he tells me the final piece of the truth. “He wasn’t himself that night, Misha. He probably didn’t know what he was saying.” Wainwright stops abruptly. I wonder whether he was about to tell me that my father had started drinking again. He folds his hands over his mouth, then opens them and smiles sadly. “Remember his greatness, Misha. That’s what I try to do.”
Suddenly, unaccountably, I am furious. At the Judge for his cryptic note, at Uncle Mal for not taking my calls, at the late Colin Scott for harassing me, at Lynda Wyatt and Marc Hadley and Cameron Knowland and everybody else who has brought me to this moment. But, just now, I am mostly angry at Wallace Warrenton Wainwright.
“I want to remember my father as he actually was,” I say calmly. I do not add: I just have to find out who he was first.
Ten minutes later, I leave the building by the main entrance, descending the steep marble stairs past shivering knots of tourists waiting for a peek inside the temple of our national oracle. Yes, Associate Justice Wallace
