Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

“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?”

“Ever since the hearings, he’s been waiting for the right moment. You know he has, Tal. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it!”

I ask a lawyer’s question. “What would make this the right moment?”

“I don’t know, Tal. But I know I’m right.”

Again: “Do we have any actual evidence?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet. But you could help me, Tal. You’re a lawyer, I’m… I used to be a journalist. We could, you know, investigate it together. Look for proof.”

I frown slightly. Mariah has always been both spontaneous and obsessive, and talking her out of her latest impulse will not be easy. “Well, we would need a reason first.”

“Jack Ziegler is a murderer. How’s that for a reason?”

“Even assuming that’s true…”

“It’s not an assumption.” Her eyes flash with fresh fury. “How can you defend a man like that?”

“I’m not defending anyone.” I do not want to pick a fight, so I answer her challenge with another: “So, do you have a plan in mind? Do you want to call Uncle Mal?”

Mariah is trapped and she knows it. She does not really want an investigation, and knows as well as I do that nothing would change, that the heart attack would still be a heart attack, that she would be made to look a fool. She cannot call Mallory Corcoran, one of the most powerful lawyers in the city, and demand, on nothing but hope, that he shake up the world for her. Mariah refuses to look at me, scowling instead in the direction of the gleaming white SubZero refrigerator, already decorated, through some domestic alchemy, with the inevitable pictures of dogs and trees and ships, crudely drawn in crayon by her younger children-the sort of sentimental bric-a-brac that the Judge would never have tolerated.

“I don’t know,” Mariah mumbles, the lines of exhaustion plain on her stubborn face.

“Well, if-”

“I don’t know what to do.” She shakes her head slowly, her gaze on the white table between us. And this tiny chink in Mariah’s emotional armor offers me a bright, sad insight into the life she leads all day as Howard rides off to far provinces to slay financial dragons for the clients, and the profits, of Goldman Sachs. The pictures on the refrigerator are the fruits of my sister’s frantic efforts yesterday to keep her children busy as she went about the debilitating business of planning, virtually alone, a funeral service for the father she spent four decades trying unsuccessfully to please.

“I’m so tired,” Mariah declares, a rare admission of weakness. I look away for a moment, not wanting her to see how these three simple words have touched me, not even wanting to acknowledge the commonality. The truth is that Mariah and Addison and I always seem to be exhausted. The scandal that destroyed our father’s career somehow energized him for a new one but left his family debilitated. We children have never quite recovered.

“You’ve been working hard.”

“Don’t patronize me, Tal.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but her eyes flash again, and I know she has been offended by a nuance that was not even there. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I am, but…”

“Take me seriously!”

My sister is practicing her best glare. The weariness is gone. The confusion is gone. I remember reading in college that social psychologists believe anger is functional, that it builds self-confidence and even creativity. Well, I don’t know about the creative part, but Mariah, angry at me as usual, is suddenly as confident as ever.

“Okay,” I offer, “okay, I’m sorry.” My sister waits, giving nothing. She wants me to make the move, saying something to show that I am taking her crazy idea seriously. So I formulate a serious question:

“What can I do to help?” Leaving open the matter of what exactly I am offering to help with.

Mariah shakes her head, starts to speak, then shrugs. To my surprise, tears begin a slow course down her cheeks.

“Hey,” I say. I almost reach out to brush them away, then remember the foyer and decide to sit still. “Hey, kid, it’s okay. It is.”

“No, it isn’t okay,” Mariah sobs, making a fist with her dainty hand and striking the table with considerable force. “I don’t think. .. I don’t think it will ever be okay.”

“I miss him too,” I say, which is quite possibly a lie, but is also, I hope, the right thing to say.

Crying openly now, Mariah buries her face in her hands, still shaking her head. And still I dare not touch her.

“It’s okay,” I say again.

My sister lifts her head. In her grief and despair, she has attained a truly haunting beauty, as though pain has freed her from mere mortal concerns.

“Jack Ziegler is a monster,” she says shortly. Well, that at least is true, even if only a fraction of the wicked things the papers say about him ever happened. But it is also true that he has been tried and acquitted at least three times, including once for murder, and, as far as I know, continues to live up in Aspen, Colorado, fabulously wealthy and as safe from the world’s law-enforcement authorities as the Constitution of the United States can make him.

“Mariah,” I say, still softly, “I don’t think anybody in the family has seen Uncle Jack in more than ten years. Not since… well, you know.”

“That’s not true,” she says tonelessly. “Daddy saw him last week. They had dinner.”

For a moment, I can think of nothing to say. I find myself wondering how she can know who the Judge saw and when. I almost embarrass myself by raising this question, but Mariah saves me:

“Daddy told me. I talked to him. To Daddy. He called me two days. .. two days, uh, before…”

She trails off and turns away, because it is not the habit of our family to share our deepest pains, even to each other. She covers her eyes. I consider walking around the table, crouching next to my sister, slipping my arms around her, offering what physical comfort I can, maybe even telling her that the Judge telephoned me, too, although, in good Garland fashion, I was too busy to call him back. I envision the scene, her response, her joy, her fresh tears: Tal, Tal, oh, it’s so good to be friends again! But that is not who I am, still less who Mariah is, so, instead, I sit still, preserving my poker face, wondering whether any reporters have gotten hold of the story, which would only be a fresh disaster. I can see the headlines now:

DISGRACED JUDGE MET WITH ACCUSED MURDERER DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH. I nearly shudder. The conspiracy theorists, for whom no famous death ever flows from natural causes, have already started to work, granted time on the wilder radio talk shows (“Rats,” Kimmer calls them, who has a way with acronyms) to explain why the heart attack that felled my father is necessarily a lie. I have scarcely noticed their antics, but now, imagining what some of the callers might say if they heard about the Judge’s meeting with Uncle Jack, I begin to understand the strange turnings of my sister’s paranoia. Then Mariah makes it worse.