The Emperor of Ocean Park Read Free Page B

some fellow out in Idaho, my opponent in a postal chess tournament, who has found the one move I hoped he would miss. A reminder from Ben Montoya, the deputy dean, about some big lawyer who is speaking tonight. A moderately threateningletter from the university library about some book I have evidently lost. From the middle of the stack, I pull out the new Harvard Law Review, skim the table of contents, then drop it, fast, after coming across yet another scholarly article explaining why my infamous father is a traitor to his race, for that is the level to which the darker nation has been reduced: being unable to influence the course of a single event in white America, we waste our precious time and intellectual energy maligning each other, as though we best serve the cause of racial progress by kicking other black folks around.
    All right, I have done my work for the day.
    The telephone rings.
    I stare at the instrument, thinking—not for the first time—what a nasty, intrusive, uncivil thing the telephone really is, demanding, irritating, interrupting, invading the mind’s space. I wonder why Alexander Graham Bell is such a hero. His invention destroyed the private realm. The device has no conscience. It rings when we are sleeping, showering, praying, arguing, reading, making love. Or when we just want desperately to be left alone. I think about not answering. I have suffered enough. And not only because my mercurial wife hung up so abruptly. This has been one of those peculiar Thursdays on which the telephone refuses to stop its angry clamor for attention: a frustrated law-review editor demanding that I dispatch an overdue draft of an article, an unhappy student seeking an appointment, American Express looking for last month’s payment, all have had their innings. The dean of the law school, Lynda Wyatt—or Dean Lynda, as she likes to be addressed by everybody, students, faculty, and alumni alike—called just before lunch to assign me to yet another of the ad hoc committees she is always creating. “I only ask because I love you,” she crooned in her motherly way, which is what she says to everybody she dislikes.
    The phone keeps ringing. I wait for the voice mail to answer, but the voice mail, like most of the university’s cut-rate technology, operates best when not needed. I decide to ignore it, but then I remember that my conversation with Kimmer ended badly, so perhaps she is calling to make up.
    Or to argue some more.
    Bracing myself for either alternative, I snatch up the handset, hoping for the voice of my possibly repentant wife, but it is only the great Mallory Corcoran, my father’s law partner and last remaining friend, as well as a Washington fixer of some repute, calling to tell me that the Judge is gone.

CHAPTER 2
A VISIT TO THE COAST
    (I)
    I ARRIVE in Washington on Friday afternoon, the day after my father’s death, leave my bags at the home of Miles and Vera Madison, my wife’s diffident and proper parents, then go over to the Shepard Street house, only to find that Mariah, in her orderly way, has done most of what needs doing. (By unspoken agreement, we both know the family cannot rely on flighty Addison, who has yet to relay any travel plans.) Long ago, Mariah was a plump, disorderly child, with a terrible inferiority complex about her younger, fair-skinned sister, for an obsession with pigmentation is even now the curse of our race, especially in families like mine. As she grew older, Mariah became a stately, almost regal, beauty, somehow ignored nevertheless by the men of the Gold Coast (as we style our narrow, upper-middle-class strip of the darker nation), perhaps running now to fleshiness, but that is to be expected after bearing five children, according to sour Kimmer, professional lawyer and amateur fitness guru. (Kimmer has borne exactly one, a half-planned accident we named Bentley after his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.) The adult Mariah is also fabulously well organized, the