“Tell who what?”
“Tell the White House that it isn’t me.”
“Well, if you really want me to,” he murmurs dubiously, implying that he is not sure they would believe him, or that they should.
“Please.”
“I will,” he says, but he means he won’t. “So, anyway, stay tuned.”
“Right.”
“Good. That’s what we’re here for. Oh, and let us know if there is anything the firm can do.”
“Of course,” I tell him.
Stuart, I am thinking as I hang up. That pompous idiot, Stuart Land.
CHAPTER 29
“Are you okay, Tal?” asks Shirley Branch, pecking me on the cheek as I step across the threshold of her condo. She peers sympathetically at the still-visible bruise under my eye. Outside, the wet New England winter wind carries on its annual December argument with those who prefer warmth. “I heard you almost got arrested. Let me have your coat. Where’s your wife?” One question stumbling over another, because Shirley possesses the kind of disordered brilliance that cannot keep up with itself.
I shake my head and hand Shirley my parka, answering the first question for about the tenth time in the past two days and the second for about the hundredth time in the past year. No, I was not almost arrested, I tell her; a minor misunderstanding, nothing more. And Kimmer could not attend the dinner party because the sitter came down with the flu, which is true enough, even though, had the sitter been well, Kimmer would have found some other excuse. Dinner with law school faculty is, for my wife, a little bit like being stretched on the rack, only without the health benefits. Kimmer, who at surprising moments decides she likes my company, suggested that I should stay home, but when I told her I thought that was a very good idea, she changed her mind, citing the very arguments that persuaded us to accept Shirley’s invitation to Saturday dinner in the first place: Shirley is the school’s first black female professor, and there is such a thing as solidarity, even in these fractured times. Shirley is my former student and research assistant, and there is such a thing as loyalty, even in these selfish times.
But I think the real reason Kimmer wanted at least one of us to go was in order to spy on Marc Hadley, who is also on the guest list. Kimmer and Marc have not been in the same room since they became contenders for the vacancy on the court of appeals, and my path and Marc’s have barely crossed at the law school, not least because I have spent so much time away. I think Kimmer, who is a good deal less intimidated by my colleagues than she thinks she is, decided that it is time to take his measure.
Until it turned out we had no sitter: then she sent me on alone.
“Have you seen Cinque?” Shirley asks hopefully in her gentle Mississippi accent-Cinque being the quite formidable name of the quite unformidable terrier which now and then accompanies her to her small office in violation of numerous university rules. “He got out somehow.”
“I’m afraid not,” I tell her.
“Are you really okay, Tal? I’m not sure you actually know everybody. You’ve met Reverend Young, right? No? Oh, you have? He’s my pastor. Your eye looks terrible. Are you sure you didn’t see Cinque out there? He’s not really a winter dog.”
“I’m sure he’s fine, Shirley,” I murmur, and she shrugs and tries to smile.
I smile back as best I can. The pain in my ribs is less, but the stitches in my cheek itch terrifically. Stuart Land turns out to be away for a few days-in Washington, no less-so I have been unable to upbraid him for his efforts to sabotage Marc Hadley, if, indeed, Stuart is the one who is doing it. The stranger with the voluptuous voice has not called back with any further reassurances, but I no longer sense that I am being followed. Were things otherwise, I suppose I would have skipped the party.
I am among the last of the guests to arrive. Marc and Dahlia Hadley are already here, as are Lynda Wyatt and her sleepy husband, Norm, the architect. And crafty old Ben Montoya, Lynda’s strong right hand, whose wife, like mine, is substituting for a babysitter sick with flu. Lem Carlyle and his wife are expected a little later, after their daughter’s ballet recital. Four of the most powerful members of the faculty, plus me. Shirley was my student ten years ago in the first torts class I ever taught. She is three years away from a tenure vote, but she already knows whose good opinions matter. And she is sufficiently street-wise to understand that evaluations of her scholarship, no matter how we try to fight it, will always be influenced, at least a little, by how much the evaluators like her as a person.
Three guests have no direct university connections. My sometime counselor, Reverend Dr. Morris Young, is accompanied by his quiet wife, Martha, who is nearly as pudgy as he is-quiet, that is, outside of church, for her voice is the loudest, if not perhaps the best, in the choir, which sings all over the state. The other is rail-thin Kwame Kennerly, a shamelessly calculating politico with prematurely thinning hair and a magnificent goatee, along with a reputation as a rabble-rouser, implicated but never quite caught in several municipal scandals, who currently serves, as Kimmer likes to say, as the mayor’s special assistant in charge of keeping the minority community domesticated, although his job title reads “deputy chief of staff.” He is also, I realize as he slips his arm around her slim waist, Shirley’s boyfriend. And it occurs to me that Shirley is strengthening her ties not only with the most influential professors at the law school, but with two of the most influential figures in the city’s black community.
In short, she is fitting in; I, her ex-teacher, beam.
Kwame Kennerly, standing right behind Shirley with a wineglass in his hand, is quite rude as Shirley introduces me, presumably because he blames me for being my father’s son, an attitude I frequently encounter from activists of the left. (Those on the right are always in a great hurry to shake my hand, with as little reason.) I often see Kwame’s name in the Clarion, for he is one of those rising politicians who manage to be everyplace at once, but I have never met him. He is a long, sinewy man whose wide, blinking eyes disagree with you before you have opened your mouth. For this occasion, perhaps because Shirley lives on the water, he is sporting a navy blazer with brass buttons even though it is out of season, the sort of offense against which my mother used to rage. As if for balance, he wears a round hat of bright orange kente cloth. The riot of color-the hat, the blazer, his dark skin, his ebon beard-is likely to be of quite intimidating effect on the white liberals present. If he feels out of place he is determined not to let on.
Shirley Branch lives in a sprawling condominium complex fronting on Elm Harbor’s narrow and seaweed- clogged beach. Her one-story unit is not very large: a bedroom that apparently doubles as her study, a kitchen the size of a closet, a single bathroom, and a long area that does duty as both living room and dining room, although the dining table, which seats twelve, takes up half the space. For the same money (so she has told me more times than I can remember), she could have bought a three-bedroom townhouse on the other side of the complex, but she would not have had her spectacular view of the water. “I don’t need much space,” she likes to say, “because it’s only just me and Cinque.” Cinque, I should explain, is Shirley’s third dog of the same name, stretching all the way back into college: she makes sure we all know she selected the appellation long before Steven Spielberg made it famous.
To sit in Shirley’s condo, to gaze out the glass doors, across the balcony, to beach and smooth black water not fifty yards away, is almost to be transported back to Oak Bluffs.
Almost.
Shirley is a slim, flat-footed woman with a long, sad face and prominent teeth-what we used to call a horsey face when I was a child. Her eyes are a little bit too sincere, her flip hairdo is a little bit too pressed, her movements are a little bit too frenetic: even as a student, she had a tendency to overdo. Her work is principally about race, and she is determinedly, aggressively, almost palpably leftish. To hear Shirley tell it, no problem facing America or the world has any cause but white racism. Her mind is keen and energetic, she loves to write, but her
