have a terrible time when he used words like wittol and pettifoggery, and he was once bleeped out on one of the radio talk shows for describing a particular candidate’s shift to the right during the Republican presidential primaries as an act of ecdysis.) Oh, yes, people hated him, and he reveled in their enmity.
Mariah, naturally, made more of all this than I did. I have always thought that the far left and far right need each other, desperately, for if either one were to vanish the other would lose its reason to exist, a conviction that has freshened in me from year to year, as each grows ever more vehement in its search for somebody to hate. Now and then, I even wondered aloud to Kimmer-I would say it to no one else-whether my father manufactured half his political views in order to keep his face on television, his enemies at his heels, and his speaking fees in the range of half a million dollars a year. But Mariah, having been in her time both philosophy major and investigative journalist, sees oppositions as real; the Judge and his enemies, she would say, were playing out the great ideological debates of the era. It was the culture war, she would insist, that brought him down. I thought this proposition quite silly, and came to think, after years of reading about it, that the scandal-mongers who drove him from the bench might have had a point; and I made the mistake of saying this, too, on the telephone to Mariah, not long after Bob Woodward published his best-selling book about the case. The book, I told her, was pretty convincing: the Judge was not a victim but a perjurer.
Aghast at this unexpected break in the family ranks, even in private, Mariah swore in my presence for what I am fairly certain was the first time in our mutual lives. I asked her whether she had actually read the book, and she responded that she had no time for such trash, although trash was not the word she actually selected. She had called, you should understand, because she wanted the entire family-that is, the three children-to write a joint letter to the Times as a protest against its favorable review of the Woodward book. She still had friends there who would see that it was published, she said. I declined and told her why. She told me that I had to do it, that it was my duty. I mumbled something about letting sleeping dogs lie. She told me that I never did anything she wanted me to do, dredging up a story I myself had forgotten about some lonely friend of hers she begged me to ask out when I was in college. Mariah said I should, just once, stand up for her. She said she had never done anything to deserve being treated the way I treated her. I thought about my Willie Mays baseball card, but decided not to mention it. Instead, a bit irritated, I am afraid I called her immature-no, tell the truth, the term I used was spoiled brat -and Mariah, after a heavy pause, answered with what I considered an unprovoked assault on my wife, which began, “Speaking of lying down with bratty dogs, how’s your bitch?” My sister can play the dozens with anybody, and certainly with me, having honed her skills during her long and passionate membership in a rather exclusive and notoriously catty black sorority. When I suggested huffily that it was inappropriate for her to talk about Kimmer in those terms-very well, I put it a bit more strongly than that-Mariah asked angrily whether I ever raised the same objection to the things she knew my wife said about her. As I floundered in search of an answer, she added that blood was thicker than water, that this was something I owed to the family. And when I tried to climb up on my pedagogical high horse, proposing that my higher duty was to truth, she asked me why in that case I didn’t just take out a full-page ad in the paper: MY FATHER IS GUILTY AND MY WIFE IS UNFAITHFUL. But that is how badly we always get along. So, when Mariah pulls me aside in the grim family-filled foyer at Shepard Street and whispers that she has to talk to me later on in private, I assume she wants to discuss the remaining details of the funeral, for what else have we two lifelong enemies left to talk about? But I am wrong: what my sister wants to tell me is the name of the man who murdered our father.
(II)
I laugh when Mariah tells me. I confess it freely, if guiltily. It is terrible of me, but I do it anyway. Perhaps it is a matter of exhaustion. We have no time together until after midnight, when we at last sit down at the kitchen table drinking hot cocoa, me still in my tie, my sister, fresh from the shower, in a fluffy blue robe. Howard and the children and some subset of the numberless cousins are asleep, crammed into various corners of the grand old house. The kitchen, which my father recently had redone, is sparkling white; the counters, the appliances, the walls, the curtains, the table, everything the same sheeny white. At night, with all the lights on, the reflections hurt my eyes, lending an air of insanity to what is already surreal.
“What exactly are you laughing at?” Mariah demands, rearing back from the table. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You think Jack Ziegler killed Dad?” I splutter, still not quite able to get my mind around it. “Uncle Jack? What for?”
“You know what for! And don’t call him Uncle Jack!”
I shake my head, trying to be gentle, wishing Addison would arrive after all, because he is far more patient with Mariah than I will ever be. A moment ago, before uttering the name, my sister was nervous, maybe even frightened. Now she is furious. So I guess you could say I have at least improved her mood.
“No, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t even know what makes you think somebody killed him. He had a heart attack, remember?”
“Why would he suddenly have a heart attack now?”
“That’s how they are. They’re sudden.” My impatience is making me cruel, and I try to force myself to slow down. My sister is no fool, often discerning things that others miss. Mariah was the subject of a small piece in Ebony magazine back in the mid-1980s, when, as a twenty-six-year-old reporter at the New York Times, she achieved a Pulitzer nomination for a series of stories about the diverse lives of children who eat in soup kitchens. But she suddenly quit her job not long after, when the paper began investigating my father in earnest. Although Mariah called it a protest, the truth is that she left the workforce entirely and, together with her very new husband, moved to a lovely old colonial in Darien-the first of three, each larger than the last-promising to devote all her time to her children, and in this way endeared herself to our mother, who believed to the day she died that women belong in the home. Darien is not that far from Elm Harbor, but these days Mariah and I see each other twice a year, if unlucky. It is not so much that we do not love each other, I think, as that we do not quite like each other. I resolve, for perhaps the hundredth time, to do better by my sister. “Besides,” I add, softly, “he wasn’t exactly young.”
“Seventy isn’t old. Not any more.”
“Still, he did have a heart attack. The hospital said so.”
“Oh, Tal,” she sighs, flapping a hand at me and feigning world-weariness, “there are so many drugs that can cause heart attacks. I used to work the police beat, remember? This is my area. And it’s really hard to catch this stuff in the autopsy. I mean, you are really so innocent.”
I decide to give that one a miss, especially since Kimmer is constantly saying the same thing about me, for different reasons. I offer an olive branch: “Okay, okay. So why would Uncle Jack want to kill him?”
“To shut him up,” she says heavily, then stops and draws in her breath so suddenly that I cast a quick look over my shoulder, to see whether Jack Ziegler, the family bogeyman, might be peering in the window. I see only my mother’s collection of crystal paperweights, gathered from countries all over the world, lined up on the sill like shiny eggs with transparent shells, and, in the glass of the window, my own reflection mocking me: an exhausted, sagging Talcott Garland, looking less like a law professor in his unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses and close- cropped hair and crooked tie than like a child wishing it would all be over. I turn back to look at my sister. Like Mallory Corcoran, our “Uncle Mal,” the man we call Uncle Jack is not related to us by blood or marriage. The family bestowed upon these white friends of my father honorary titles when they became godparents-Uncle Mal to Mariah, Uncle Jack to Abby-but, unlike Uncle Mal, Jack Ziegler had far more to do with my father’s destruction than with his redemption.
“Shut him up about what?” I ask softly, because it has always been Mariah’s position that my father knew nothing about Uncle Jack’s more questionable activities, that the suggestion of any business connection between the two of them was no more than a white-liberal plot against a brilliant and therefore dangerous black conservative. Maybe that is why Mariah stops: she sees the trap into which her own reasoning leads.
“I don’t know,” she mutters, looking down and clutching her mug with a mother’s fierce protectiveness.
This might be a good moment to let my sister’s fantasy drop, but, having listened this far, I decide that it is my duty to help her see how nutty an idea it is. “Then what makes you think Uncle Jack had anything to do with it?”
