Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

On the other hand, my sister’s marriage is happy.

Mariah murmurs my name and touches my face and is, for an instant, my sister and not my adversary. The red is gone, the room is back. I almost hug her, which I do not think I have done in ten years, and I even believe that she would let me; but the moment passes. “We can talk later,” she says, and pushes me gently but definitely away. “Go say hello to Sally,” she adds as she turns to greet her next guest. “She’s crying in the kitchen.”

I nod dumbly, still not sure why these moods come over me, trying to remember when last this malady struck. As I turn into the dreary hallway, Mariah is already telling somebody else how good it was of him to come and bestowing a kiss on each cheek. I greet Howard as I pass, but he is too busy collecting business cards to do more than grimace and wave. A quick shimmer of red dances around his head and is gone. I turn away. The numberless cousins, as my father used to call them, seem to pack every square foot of the first floor: numberless simply because the Judge never really bothered to get them straight. Presiding over the cousins, as always, is the ageless Alma, or Aunt Alma, as our parents insisted we call her, although Alma herself, in secret, embracing us in great clouds of sachet, commanded us all to call her “just Alma,” which we often took literally, although not to her face: Mariah, is Just Alma here yet? Or even: Mommy! Daddy! Just Alma is on the phone! Just Alma, who is my father’s second cousin or great-aunt or something, admits to some eighty-one years and has probably lived longer, skinny as a tree branch and loud and fun and raunchy, never quite still, gracefully deporting herself in the jazzy rhythms that have sustained the darker nation ever since its coerced beginnings. As a child, I sought her out at every family gathering, because she was always pulling nickels and dimes out of unexpected pockets and forcing them upon us; I seek her out now because she has been, since our mother died, the family’s gravitational force, drawing us toward her as though she can curve space.

“Tal cott! ” Alma cries when she sees me, leaning on her intricately carved cane, smiling her flirtatious grin. “Getcha self on over here!”

I kiss Alma gently, and she awards me a quick squeeze. I can feel her fragile bones move, and I marvel that the winds of age have not managed to blow Alma away. Her breath smells of cigarettes: Kools, which she has been smoking since some legendary act of protest when she was a high-schooler in Philadelphia almost seven decades ago. She was married for more than half a century to a preacher who was a power in Pennsylvania politics, and who was eulogized by the Vice-President of the United States.

“It’s good to see you, Alma.”

“That’s the problem! All good-lookin men ever wanna do with me is see!” She cackles and slaps my shoulder, fairly hard. Alma, despite her tiny frame, bore six children, all of whom are still living, five of whom are college graduates, four of whom are still in first marriages, three of whom work for the city of Philadelphia, two of whom are doctors, one of whom is gay: there is some sort of numerical principle at work. Together Alma’s children, along with her grands and great-grands, account for the largest subset of the numberless cousins. She lives in a cramped apartment in one of the less desirable neighborhoods of Philadelphia but spends so much time visiting her descendants that she is away more than she is home.

“You’d probably be too much for me, Alma.”

I give her another quick squeeze and prepare to move on. Alma grips my biceps, holding me in place. Her eyes are half covered with thick yellow cataracts, but her gaze is sharp and alive. “You know your daddy loved you very much, don’t you, Talcott?”

“Yes,” I say, although with the Judge love was less knowledge than guess.

“He had plans for you, Talcott.”

“Plans?”

“For the sake of the family. You’re the head of the family now, Talcott.”

“I would think that would be Addison.” Stiffly. I am offended and not sure why.

She shakes her little head. “No, no, no. Not Addison. You. That’s the way your daddy wanted it.”

I purse my lips, trying to figure out if she is serious. I am flattered and worried at the same time. The idea of being the head of the Garland family, whatever it might mean, has an odd appeal, no doubt the expression of some ancient male gene for dominance.

“Okay, Alma.”

She hugs me a little tighter, refusing to be mollified. “Talcott, he had plans for you. He wanted you to be the one who…” Alma blinks and leans away again. “Well, never mind, never mind. He’ll let you know.”

“Who’ll let me know, Alma?”

She chooses to answer a different question. “You have the chance to make everything right, Talcott. You can fix it.”

“Fix what?”

“The family.”

I shake my head. “Alma, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I mean, Talcott. Remember the good times we used to have in Oak Bluffs? You kids, your daddy and mommy, me, Uncle Derek-back when Abigail was still with us,” Alma concludes suddenly, surprising me with a small sob.

I take her hand. “I don’t think human beings can fix things like that.”

“Right. But your daddy will let you know what to do when the time comes.”

“My daddy? You mean the Judge?”

“You got some other daddy?”

This is the other thing everybody says about Alma: she is no longer quite all there.

Extricating myself at last, I remember that I am supposed to be looking for Sally. All the crazy Garland women, I am thinking: is it we Garland men who give them their neuroses, or is it just coincidence? I struggle through the throng. I wonder why all these people are here now, why they couldn’t wait for the wake. Maybe Mariah isn’t planning one. A couple of strangers thrust their hands at me. Somebody whispers that the Judge didn’t suffer and we should count our blessings, and I want to spin around and ask, Were you there?… but instead I nod and walk on, as my father would have. Somebody else, another white face, mumbles that the torch has been passed and it is all up to the children now, but neglects to define it. Just outside the kitchen, I frown at the hearty handshake of an elderly Baptist minister, high in the councils of one of the older civil rights organizations, a man who, I am pretty sure, actually testified against my father’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And now has the temerity to pretend to mourn with us. The handshake seems interminable, his ancient fingertips keep moving on my flesh, and I finally realize that he is trying to impart the secret hailing sign of some fraternity, not knowing, perhaps, that rejecting the overtures of such groups was one of my very few acts of rebellion against my parents’ way of life-the life, I often think, from which Kimmer, my fellow rebel, rescued me. Nor is it my pleasure to enlighten him. I simply want to escape his insincere unctuousness, and I can feel the veil of red about to return. He refuses to let go. He is talking about how close he and my father were in the past. How sorry he is about the way things turned out. I am about to respond with something rather un-Christian, when all at once a whirlwind of small bodies hurricanes past, nearly knocking us both to the floor; the five Denton children, ages four through twelve, are rushing in their leaderless headlong way to trash some other area of the house. They number Malcolm, Marshall, the twins Martin and Martina, and the baby, Marcus. Mariah, I know, is even now hunting desperately for a name for the very obvious sixth little Denton, due in late February or early March, but is at a loss to find a way to honor both our history and her pattern. This latest pregnancy is in any case a scandal, at least within the four walls of my house. A year ago, when she was forty-two, Mariah confided to my astonished wife that she wanted to bear one more child, which Kimmer denounced, to my private ear, as an irresponsible waste and self-indulgence: for Kimmer, like my father, values most those who differ from her least.