The Emperor of Ocean Park Read Free Page A

inconsiderable intellectual gifts who, before law school, majored in French at Pomona and was never called upon to manipulate numbers. Since her arrival in Elm Harbor, the discovery of statistics has made her delightfully crazy. She was in my torts class last fall and has spent most of her time since on her twin loves: our legal-aid clinic, where she helps welfare mothers avoid eviction, and her collection of statistics, by which she hopes to show that the white race is headed for self-destruction, a prospect that gladdens her.
    “Hey, Professor Garland?” she calls in her best West Coast slur.
    “Good afternoon, Ms. Smallwood,” I answer formally, because I have learned through hard experience not to be too familiar with students. I walk toward the stairs.
    “Guess what?” she enthuses, cutting off my escape, heedless of the possibility that I might be headed someplace. Her hair is a very short Afro, one of the last in the school. I am old enough to remember when few black women of her age wore their hair any other way, but nationalism turned out to be less an ideology than a fad. Her eyes are a little too far apart, giving her a mildly unsettling walleyed look when she meets your gaze. She moves very fast for a woman of her bulk, and is consequently not so easy to avoid. “I’ve been looking at those numbers again. On white women?”
    “I see.” Trapped, I gaze up at the ceiling, decorated with ornate plaster sculptures: religious symbols, garlands of yew leaves, hints of justice, all repainted so often that they are losing their sharp definition.
    “Yeah, and, so, guess what? Their fertility rate—white women?—is so low now that there won’t be any white babies by about 2050.”
    “Ah—are you sure about those figures?” Because Crysta, although brilliant, is also completely nuts. As her teacher, I have discovered that her enthusiasm makes her careless, for she often cites data, with great confidence, before taking the time to understand them.
    “Maybe 2075?” she proposes, her friendly tone implying that we can negotiate.
    “Sounds a little shaky, Ms. Smallwood.”
    “It’s because of abortion.” I am on the move again, but Crysta easily keeps stride. “Because they’re killing their babies? That’s the main reason.”
    “I really think you should consider another topic for your paper,” I answer, feinting around her to reach the sweeping marble staircase to the faculty offices.
    “It’s not just abortion”—her voice carries up the stairwell after me, causing one of my colleagues, nervous little Joe Janowsky, to peer over the marble railing in his thick glasses to see who is shouting—“it’s also interracial marriages, because white women—”
    Then I am through the double doors to the corridor and Crysta’s speculations are mercifully inaudible.
    I was like her once, I remind myself as I slip into my office. Every bit as certain I was right on subjects I knew nothing about. Which is probably how I got hired in the first place, for I was intellectually bolder when I was intellectually younger.
    That, plus the happenstance of being my father’s son, for his influence around the campus faded only slightly after the trauma of his confirmation hearings. Even today, well over a decade after the Judge’s fall, I am buttonholed by students who want to hear from my own mouth that my father is indeed who they have heard he is, and by colleagues who want me to explain to them how it felt to sit there day after miserable day, listening stoically as the Senate methodically destroyed him.
    “Like watching somebody in zugzwang, ” I always say, but they are not serious chess players, so they never get it. Although, being professors, they pretend to.
    Searching for a distraction, I leaf through my IN box. A memorandum from the provost’s office about parking rates. An invitation to a conference on tort reform in California three months from now, but only if I pay my own way. A postcard from