week. The phone would ring at two in the morning and Leander would grab it, and I would lie there watching him, and he would whisper a few words, and then his skin would go pale, and I could see he was trying to say the right thing, trying to soothe, but after a while, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And later Leander would tell me that it was Oliver, and he was crying on the telephone. I’m sorry, but that’s what he said. That he was crying and kept saying things like, ‘How could he do this to me?’ Meaning that law clerk, Leander said, the one who testified against him. Or he would say, ‘I did everything I was supposed to do, I did my job right, how could he put me in this position? Whatever happened to loyalty?’ Things like that. Leander got a little frightened for him. Because of the way he was raving about his law clerk, and also because… well, Leander thought he sounded drunk again.”
“Drunk! But… but he stopped drinking back when… years before.”
Lanie shakes her head, the gray eyes solemn and sympathetic, the way they must be when she tells a patient she has ovarian cancer. “I guess he started again. At least that’s what my Leander thought. And. ..”
“Wait. Wait a minute. If he was drinking, I would have known about it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, for one thing, I came down from Elm Harbor when all this was going on. Now, my father didn’t talk to me about any of it. I’m not even sure he wanted me around.” A sudden, hot catch in my throat. I never wanted to remember this, never expected to. “He… he didn’t talk to me about any of it,” I repeat, trying to find my place. “Neither did… neither did my mother. I guess they weren’t… they weren’t the kind of people who talked much about, uh, feelings. Problems. So, when all this happened, when his nomination fell apart, we… the children… couldn’t get them to open up. But, still, drinking… if he was drinking…” I trail off, my eyes misty and stinging. I remember Wallace Wainwright’s unsubtle hints during our meeting yesterday: He wasn’t himself. He didn’t know what he was saying. Maybe I was the only one who didn’t realize that my father, in his pain and humiliation, had crawled back into the bottle.
Melanie Cross is physician enough to know that there are times when you do not reach out to comfort your patients, and she says nothing. She waits. For a terrible moment, I relive the sudden plummet from joy to horror, from a household topsy-turvy with phone calls and friends and telegrams because the Judge was about to become the Justice, to the lonely, brave, hopeless death-watch as friends disappeared and the phone grew silent-except for the soulless media-once it became clear that not only the nomination but my father’s career itself was doomed. At the time I was enduring my third and final year of law school, and I skipped classes for the first glorious days of the hearings, then returned, a little over two weeks later, to sit in the back of the room as Greg Haramoto’s testimony and a tidal wave of corroborating evidence washed away my father’s protestations of innocence. After that first, wonderful morning, I stayed on at the Shepard Street house, as well-wishers and social climbers swirled in and out of the door, and my parents, at their royal and charming best, accepted the adulation as their due. But, after the dam broke, when I wanted to help, it became clear that neither of my parents quite knew what to do with me.
“I didn’t spend much time at the house,” I say finally. “I was still in law school.”
“I remember,” says Lanie, smiling with warm reminiscence and gossipy mischief. “You and Kimmer had just started dating, right?”
I hesitate, for Lanie has, perhaps unintentionally, set me a little verbal trap. In 1986, at the time of my father’s nomination, Kimmer and I were classmates, nothing more, each of us-technically, anyway-dating someone else. In truth, the two of us were in the oh-no-we-better-stop-wait-what-about-Kathy stage of rekindling what had once been a rather passionate relationship; like most young adults of that era-or, for that matter, this one-we were besotted with the notion, dangerously antithetical to civilized life, that obeying our instincts was not merely our right but our responsibility. Somehow that tendency has always been the leitmotif of our attraction: three times, maybe more, depending on how you count, we have wound up in each other’s arms at a moment when at least one of us belonged to someone else.
Not ready to confess to Lanie what everybody already knows, I decide, as so often, that the best answer is a distraction. “I guess you could be right. About my father’s drinking, I mean. I wasn’t living in the house. If my father was drinking, say, at night… well, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”
“I’m sorry, Tal.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s… believable.”
“You know, Tal, my husband tried… the first time, after Abby
… he tried to get your dad some help for his drinking. But Oliver kept saying no. And, of course, he stopped on his own.” Drumming her nails on the table. “Leander said your father always seemed a little insulted when he brought up the idea of treatment.”
“He would have been.” I sigh, heart heavy with memory. “He considered counseling and therapy the final resort of the weak of will.”
“Alcoholism is a disease…” the doctor in her begins, automatically.
Laughing, I put up my hands in surrender. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I know it’s a disease, and I know there’s a genetic tendency to it, which are two reasons that I never touch the stuff.” Then I grow sad again. “And if it’s a disease and my father never had any treatment… well, yes, I can believe that he would have started again.” I play with my food, my appetite fading. None of this is what I came for. All I have done is reopened the never-quite-healed wounds of those debilitating days. But I press on. “Is that all your husband told you? The drinking? The… the crazy phone calls?”
“Well, no. No, there was more.” Lanie clucks her tongue thoughtfully. She is about to drop another veil and, obviously, wondering whether she should. “Like… the chess,” she says at last.
“The chess? What chess?”
Lanie’s strong brow furrows in thought. She brushes her hair back again, forks some salad into her mouth. I wait while she sips her water. “Leander used to drop by to see your father in the evenings, both while this was going on and… and afterward. He didn’t always call first…”
“Because he wanted to see if my dad was drinking,” I suggest.
“I suppose that was part of it. But also remember, Tal, they were from a different generation. Dropping by unannounced was what friends did. It wasn’t like today, where nobody’s house is ever neat or ready for company, so you call first so your friends can clean everything up. People’s houses, people’s lives were more… oh, more open in a way. Not that nobody had any secrets, but, you know, there was a kind of a sense that… that… that your friends could see you as you really are. Were. You know what I’m saying.”
“Yes.” I smile slightly, hoping Lanie will hurry, because it is quarter past one and I know she has a patient at two. Or perhaps my secret memories of the neighborhood itself are generating this unexpected urge to rush. A few blocks up Columbia Road is the apartment where I lived in the late 1980s, and where Kimmer, although married to Andre, sometimes slept. Probably we ate a furtive meal or two in this very restaurant.
“Anyway. So Leander would drop by and he would usually find your father down in his little study-you know the room I mean-and Oliver would have his chessboard out, the one he was so proud of, always showing off the pieces, and he would be playing chess with himself.” She makes a face. “No, that’s not right. Let me think. I don’t know much about chess, so it’s hard to remember. No. He wasn’t playing. He was trying… he was making chess puzzles…”
“Problems.”
“Hmmm?”
“Chess problems. My father liked to… They call it composing. He liked to compose chess problems. I guess you’d call it his hobby.”
“Right!” Her face brightens. “Because, I remember, Leander told me he thought it was great therapy, should be very relaxing for your father, except… except that…”
“Except what?” I am running out of patience as well as time and wish she would just say it right out.
She looks me straight in the eye. She has caught my mood and is ready to give me the unadorned truth. “Leander thought Oliver had grown obsessional about it. About the chess problems he was composing. He didn’t even want to play golf any more, because he always was at his chessboard. He hardly went to the poker games. I’m talking about the months after the… after the problem with his nomination. So Leander would go to Shepard Street to visit him. And your mother would let him in, and he would find his way back to the study, and he would walk in the room, Oliver’s best friend, and Oliver wouldn’t even get up from the chessboard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look up. He kept talking about how even chess was fixed, white moved first, white usually won, black could only react to what white did, and even if black played a perfect game he still had to wait for white to make a mistake before he would have any hope of winning-that kind of thing.” Lanie frowns, remembering another point.
