Senators or bring them to justice, I could turn the disk over to the press and allow the media to have their frenzy. The allegations might turn some significant piece of the history of the seventies and eighties upside down. They are unproven, of course, possibly the last, desperate ravings of the Judge’s tortured brain-but none of that has ever stopped journalists from doing as much damage as possible, with the smallest number of apologies, because the people’s right to know equals, down to the last decimal place, the media’s ability to profit from scandal.
I imagine my father on the front pages again, only this time with lots of friends along for the ride. I tremble. Senators, said Wainwright. Governors. Cabinet officers. Yes, I could do a lot of damage.
And perhaps a lot of damage is what my father craved-a final revenge on the world that so rudely spurned him. Perhaps that was the reason for his note and his pawns and the rest of the perilous, puzzling trail that finally led me back to the attic of Vinerd Howse. My father’s cleverness suddenly terrifies me. The world destroyed my father, and I seem to be his chosen instrument to destroy it right back.
I experience a brief, delicious shiver of power, followed at once by a trembling of revulsion. No point in asking, Why me? No point in railing against fate. Or against God. Or against my father. Garland men do none of those things. Garland men bear troubles with a stoicism bordering on self-loathing, driving the women in our lives half crazy with our distance. Garland men make decisions with care, and then we stick to them, as the term implies, decision, cutting away, the elimination of other possibilities, even when the decisions we make are terrible. But the Judge may not have wanted me to decide at all; perhaps he died believing that the decision was made, that I would do what Addison, who had legal problems of his own, could not. Perhaps the Judge believed that I would read the names and set out to destroy, that I would do it not out of anger or a yearning for revenge, or even for the cold intellectual pleasure of seeing the guilty punished, but because my father asked me to.
The guilty should be punished-no question there.
But guilt comes in more than one variety. And so does punishment.
Addison. Now, there is a question nobody has raised, although Nunzio hinted around the edges. Alma said Addison could not be the head of the family. Sally said Addison told her to get the scrapbook Mallory Corcoran said my father thought Addison had betrayed him. And my father’s arrangements involved the younger son, not the older, whom he also loved best among his children. Could the reason be that Addison already knew it all? My brother said the Judge came to him in Chicago a year before he died, trying to get him to read Villard’s report. This, surely, was in reaction to Wainwright’s visit. My father’s immediate idea was to tell his firstborn everything, so that Addison would be his insurance policy if anything went wrong.
Only Addison wouldn’t play. I know he read the report, he knew the car that killed Abby had two people in it, not one. Maybe the Judge told my brother what happened next. Maybe Addison worked it out for himself. Either way, it upset him enough that he refused to listen to any more of the story. He did not want to know what the Judge did for Jack Ziegler in return for the murders of Phil McMichael and Michelle Hoffer. And my father, as he told Uncle Mal, and as Just Alma knew or guessed, took this for a betrayal.
So he went on to his second son. Only, this time, he was more cautious. Worried, perhaps, that I would be as rejecting as Addison, he decided to leave me no choice, to design his arrangements the way he would design one of his chess problems, so that, once he died, events would be set into motion, and I would be able to follow only one path. The path that would lead me to Vinerd Howse, and to the attic, and to George Jackson.
Probably he hoped I would figure it out the first time I saw the note.
Or maybe Addison’s involvement was not limited to telling the Judge he wanted no involvement. After all, somebody had to put the Judge’s files on the disk. My father would not have known how to do it himself; but Addison loves computers. Maybe Addison gave him instructions, maybe Addison did it for him. Either way, my brother would have had at least a rough idea of what the Judge had hidden, and why, even if he did not know where. So, why did he refuse to help Mariah and me in our separate searches? Why, when I finally reached him, did he try to talk me out of going forward?
The same reason he arranged for Sally to remove the scrapbook. Because he was there in the kitchen at Shepard Street the night the Judge first tried to make his deal with the devil. Because he had buried that secret for more than twenty years. And because he was not ready to have it exhumed.
No wonder he never found time to come to the hearings.
I miss Addison. Not the way he is now, but the way he used to be. The way it was before, as the Judge would have said. I seem to miss the same thing in every corner of my life: the way it was before. I experience my family life as an unbroken chain of losses. My brother, my sister, my wife, my mother, my father, all of them gone but Mariah. Morris Young, like the Judge when he was at his best, preaches that we should always be looking forward, not back, and I try. Oh, how I try.
I have lost my wife. My father, for all his insanity, never lost his Claire, not until the day she died. In the last few years, I have been so obsessed with my father-first with living up to his standards, and, recently, with solving the terrifying mystery he thrust upon me-that I have scarcely given my mother a thought. It is time to correct the imbalance. It is time to get to know Claire Garland again, to study her life as painstakingly as I have studied Oliver’s. I have been trying to find a place for my father in the way I remember the past. I must do the same for my wife. And I must spend enough time remembering my mother that she, too, can finally take a proper place in the rooms of my memory. If memory is our contribution to history, then history is the sum of our memories. Like all families, mine has a history. I would like to remember it.
Bentley and Miguel are down in the basement now, whispering together, the way best friends do at that age. I check on the little fire I have going this cold afternoon, then climb the stairs to the second floor, go into my small bedroom, and close the door. I sit on my cheap mattress-and-box-spring bed and stare at the dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. From his perch atop the dresser, George Jackson seems to wink at me with dark plastic eyes. The disk, undisturbed, its information leaching away, remains inside him. The diabolical scrapbook is tucked away in a drawer, hidden beneath my underused exercise togs.
I close my eyes and remember Wainwright’s flailing hand. I open them and remember his despairing words, how he wanted to retire and Jack Ziegler and his partners refused to let him step down. Probably Wainwright was the unnamed buyer who tried to purchase the house on Shepard Street, so that he would be able to search it top to bottom. Eventually he would have offered to purchase Vinerd Howse, too. With contents, no doubt.
Contents like Abby’s bear.
A flash of lightning outside reflects in George Jackson’s plastic eyes, making him wink again. He is magical, this ancient toy shedding his stuffing. I am astonished that he survived the storm, but storms are funny that way: sometimes what the riptide draws out bobs to the surface and floats back in on the next crashing wave, other times it is sucked under and disappears. The jetties extending from the sands of the Inkwell probably made his return more likely, turning some of the waves back in; but, the truth is, I got lucky.
Or maybe not. Had George never returned to shore, had the police officer never found him, had I remained unconscious, had a dozen small things been different, I would not now be facing this dilemma. Had the waves carried the bear away, I would not have to worry about what to do. There would be nothing to do, because there would be no disk to do it with.
No arrangements.
Jack Ziegler and his friends or enemies or whoever they are decided after the cemetery that I probably had already found the information my father hid, and I implicitly promised Henderson that I would keep secret what I knew. Now the belief is a fact: the arrangements are mine at last, and I feel the surging stir of temptation that power always brings.
I pick up the bear, slide the disk free, and put George back where he was. Holding the disk by its edges, I walk back down to my living-dining room. Outside the windows, the storm has yet to abate. True, it cannot hold a candle to the one that roared across the Vineyard while I was there, but a storm is a storm, and, despite the fire, the condo is growing colder.
Or maybe I am.
I remember my father’s dream, to gain a measure of fame by creating the first Double Excelsior with the knight, the task that crazy old Karl called impossible. The Double Excelsior, but with black victorious in the end: two lonely pawns, one white and one black, pathetic in their powerlessness, beginning on their home squares and matching each other, move for move, until, on the fifth turn, each reaches the far end of the board and becomes a
