“More than he would have trusted me, I’ll tell you that.” A grin makes its way to the surface of his thick white beard, and he is laughing aloud by the time he closes the door in my face.
Back in my office, I field a telephone call from a woman named Valerie Bing, who was two years behind Kimmer and myself in law school and now practices with a firm in Washington. She and Kimmer grew up a few blocks apart and have remained friends as well as professional colleagues, handling a number of matters together. Valerie says that the FBI has been in to talk to her as part of the background check. No doubt the investigators swore her to silence, but Valerie, for whom gossip is nutrition, gives me a line-by-line account of the interview. No questions about the arrangements, but they did ask Valerie if she ever heard my wife mention Jack Ziegler, a fact I immediately decide not to pass on to Kimmer.
As soon as I hang up, the phone rings again, and I find myself fending off a representative of the agency that used to book the Judge’s speaking tours. If I will keep some of his dates with the Rightpacs, it seems, the agency will guarantee me half my father’s fee. I glare at the telephone for a moment, then tell him I am not interested. He interrupts to point out that my father received forty thousand dollars per engagement, sometimes more. I am stunned. Like so many boomers, Kimmer and I live beyond our means, chronically in debt, our credit cards maxed out, our payments late. Twenty thousand dollars may be an afternoon’s income for Howard Denton, Mariah’s investment banker-husband, but it is all the money in the world to me. The man keeps talking. He says there could be television appearances, a book contract, the works.
All I would have to do is say the things my father would have said.
I’m afraid I’m not available just now for a meretricious relationship, I want to tell him, but I settle instead for a simple “No, thank you.”
He says he might be able to get me three-fourths of my father’s fee.
I repeat my refusal.
But he will not give up. He says I wouldn’t really need to speak for my father. I could talk about whatever I wanted, express any views I wanted. A couple of his clients, he adds, are very excited at the thought of having me come. All they ask is a lecture to a small group, a dinner with people who are great fans of my father, some reminiscences about the Judge, insights into his thinking. Just two or three dates, he murmurs.
At twenty to thirty thousand dollars apiece.
A debilitating worm of temptation is inching through me, thrilling and warm, as I think again of our debts. Then I remember what Morris Young said the other night about Satan, and I call a halt, rather rudely, to the conversation. “My no means no, ” I tell him.
He says he will try me again in a month or two.
An hour later, Just Alma finally calls me back. She is still in the islands, whatever that means. I have forgotten why I called her in the first place, so I ask her how she is enjoying herself instead. She complains that the men can’t keep up with her. I imagine this is true.
Then I remember and say: “Alma? Do you remember when we were down at Shepard Street? Right after the funeral?”
Over the scratchy line, she acknowledges that she does.
“You told me people would… come after me. Remember?”
“Your daddy told me. He said folks always came after the head of the Garland family.”
“Did he say… which folks?”
“Sure. The white folks,” she says at once, and my theory goes to pieces. I thought perhaps the Judge had shared with Just Alma a piece of his secret. Instead, more ramblings of his tortured mind in which everything that happened to him was somebody else’s fault.
“I see.”
Alma is not finished. “The way the white folks went after Derek.”
“Derek as in his brother? The Communist?”
“You know some other Derek? Lemme tell you something, Talcott. Your daddy, he never liked his brother, not till after he was dead. Even when they were kids, he never liked him. Never.”
“I know, Alma.” I am trying to bring the conversation to an end, but Alma rides right over me.
“Main thing was, Talcott, your daddy thought Derek complained too much about the white folks. Well, turned out the white folks got your daddy too. So he started to think maybe Derek had a point. Used to say he wished old Derek was still around, so he could tell him how sorry he was.”
“My father said he was sorry?” I try, and fail, to recall a single instance of the Judge’s ever apologizing. “What was he sorry about?”
“He was sorry they split up. Said everything went bad after that.”
“Everything like what?”
“Goodness, Talcott, I don’t know. He just said he was sorry. Because of what the white folks did. I guess maybe he just missed his brother.”
A question occurs to me. “Alma? When my father talked about splitting up with his brother-was there something particular he meant?”
“I guess when your daddy decided to be a judge and all that. He kind of had to leave all the baggage behind.”
“Derek was baggage?”
“Your daddy just missed him, Talcott, that’s all.”
This is getting me nowhere. I have to go. Fortunately, so does Alma. We talk about seeing each other over the summer, but we won’t.
(IV)
Night on Hobby road. Once more I keep my lonely vigil from the front window. I do not know what I am looking for. Around eleven, I imagine that I see a man across the street in the darkness, watching the house, a very tall man who could be black, although the shadows make it hard to tell: Foreman? Perhaps a hallucination, because, when I look again, he is gone. Half an hour later, a pickup truck jolts down the street, and I fantasize a detailed story of surveillance, alternating vehicles, legions of watchers.
Silly, of course, but I really did get beaten up a few nights ago, and somebody really did call and tell me not to worry, that everything was taken care of.
So stop worrying!
I have tried to talk to Kimmer about what has been happening, but she still refuses to listen beyond wanting to make sure I really believe we are all safe. I cannot seem to breach the wall that has arisen between us. It is as though, by being assaulted, I have become hard evidence of what my wife, still hoping for judicial office, prefers to pretend is not true: that something is going on, and that dropping it, letting it die, is no longer an option.
I shake my head. I log on to the Internet Chess Club and play four quick games with somebody from Denmark, losing three. And still I have the sense, with me now for weeks, that my efforts to reason my way through are like chewing on cotton: I chomp and chomp and chomp, but I make no progress.
Sleep is suddenly very attractive.
I hurry upstairs and look in on Bentley, whose bedroom is decorated principally with various Disneyesque images of Hercules, who was, it seems, a smiling blond Aryan with the world’s largest teeth. Herkes is our son’s word for his favorite hero. I adjust his Herkes blankets by the light of the streetlamp, check his Herkes nightlight, kiss his warm forehead, and then head down the hall to join my slumbering wife in the master bedroom at the back of the house. I undress in the bathroom, remembering with some pain the days when Kimmer and I used to leave each other little notes, and sometimes a flower, atop the vanity; WAKE ME, we would write in amorous invitation. I do not remember when we stopped, but I do know that Kimmer ignored my notes for several weeks before I realized that she wasn’t leaving them any more. I wonder whether my father, in his last years, had anybody to leave him a flower or a note at bedtime, and it occurs to me that I know nothing of his romantic life, if he even had
