Once I got out of the house, I was all right. The weather was harsh, clear but penetratingly cold. I walked to the subway without a muffler, because it is always better to warm up in the station than to arrive already warm. The express train pulled in at once, and, but for a single full stop just north of Grand Central — I have come to dread full stops, having read so many stories about passengers trapped by “police action” — it charged down the island at a nice clip. At the City Hall stop, I had a choice: I could climb one flight of stairs and find myself on the street, or descend a flight of stairs and then climb two, and find myself much closer to 1 Federal Plaza. My knees were unhappy about my choosing the latter option.

Neither Kathleen nor I knew where 1 Federal Plaza is (now we do), but I found it without any trouble, and was soon inside. My bag went through one of those X-ray devices, but none of the airport humiliations was imposed. I was soon on the third floor of the not-very-tall building, which houses the United States Court of International Trade, looking at a picture of my grandfather, William J Keefe, a judge of what was in his day the Customs Court. I learned from the accompanying biographical sketch that the Judge (as we always called him) retired in 1947, the year before I was born. I was reassured about his dying in 1955 — my malleable memory hadn’t morphed that fact.

To say that I knew nothing about the Judge’s professional life, or who his colleagues were, while he was still alive, would be frighteningly accurate. They might all have been gangsters or money launderers, or even white slavers. This was true of all the solid male citizens of Bronxville, who did their business elsewhere, in New York City, away from the women and children. Everything that we knew about their work was negative: they did not get dirty, they did not develop calluses, they did not carry boxes, they did not count out change. (Nor did they hear confessions, but of course it never occurred to me, as a child, that the priesthood was a career. There were no priests or nuns or religious people of any kind in our family.) When we were told that our fathers were working hard to provide us with the best of everything, the more inquisitive would wonder what this hard work consisted of. It did sound incredibly boring, and that was a helpful clue later on, when I was puzzling out that the top échelons of American businessmen and the professionals who served them had unwittingly settled into recreating the courtly routines of ancien régime grace and favor.

I didn’t learn much about the Judge even after he died. My father was very proud of the Judge, but their relationship had not been sympathetic, because, if you want to know what I think, my father had inherited his mother’s much more placid disposition. I used to joke that my father napped his way to the top, because, really, that is all that I ever saw: my father dozing in front of televised golf matches. Perhaps because he was determined not to inflict the outraged disappointment of high expectations that had made his own youth such a pain, my father never attempted to introduce me to the elements of his daily life. I remember poring over a prospectus that he brought home — I loved the prospectuses of those days, small and neat and closely printed, really rather  scholarly looking — and asking what a sinking fund was. Whatever his answer was, it has successfully blocked my understanding of the term ever since. He did tell me that he thought that I’d make a good lawyer, because I could write. Talk about ancien régime!

It seems that, some years ago, a retired or about-to-retire judge at the CIT took an interest in the history of the court, which has gone through several mutations since its foundation in the late Nineteenth Century, and as part of his project to know more about the court, he researched the lives of its judges, and sought out their portrait photographs. That’s what led his assistant to me. She tracked me down via an entry in this very Web log. It turned out that I did not have a suitable photograph of the Judge, but my cousin, Bill, did, and he readily contributed a copy. That was that, I thought. But then, late last month, I received a letter inviting me to “a brief ceremony to unveil these biographical sketches.” I had a brief dream of picking up Will at school and taking him downtown to the courthouse. But he is really too young to be able to remember much of such an outing. (He just might be capable of it; he is already displaying his mother’s prodigious recall.) In the end, Kathleen had to be downtown all day because of board that she is on, so the event would not be inconvenient for her. We met up at 1 Federal Plaza at the appointed time.

The court staff had tracked down five or six of the judges’ families, few older than grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The unveiling was scheduled to coincide with an all-day meeting of the lawyers who plead before the court, so the crowd was decent-sized. But I was not feeling particularly gregarious, and I contented myself with telling the family story about how the Judge got the job to the assistant who had found me on the Internet. “Oh, they’re all political,” she blandly replied, waving an arm at the wall of photographs. Be that as it may, I will close with a quote from the letter of invitation, written by Chief Judge Donald Pogue.

The CIT and its predecessor institutions have had a crucial role in ensuring the peace and stability that come from a robust international trade regime. It is only appropriate to recognize the people so critical to its success.

Every now and then, I would read something that my father had written — one his annual speeches to the security analysts, perhaps — and be struck by his ability to strike the very same statesmanlike tone, a pose utterly unfamiliar to those of us who knew him at home. I have to say that this sort of thing still takes my breath away, because it’s such a surprise. Yes, it’s the correct thing to say, if anything is going to be said, ready to be chiseled into marble; but I still can’t believe that anybody can say it.

***

After the ceremony, we found a taxi on Broadway. No sooner did we direct the driver to Alphabet City, where we were going to sit with Will while his parents went out to dinner, than the taxi’s GPS/meter crashed. It’s all one system, apparently, and the worst of it is that the driver would have to head back to Queens to have it fixed. And he had only just begun his shift! It was an awful tale of woe, and it intensified my conviction that taxis ought to managed from Manhattan, where most of them make money, and not from Queens, which who knows where that is. They ought to drain the reservoir in Central Park and excavate a capacious cavern, where taxis can be serviced and parked — and where drivers can make pit stops! (Never fear that a driver will have to be directed to Carl Schurz Park.) My proposal is preposterous, but I’ll say anything to get people thinking.

As we approached Avenue C, the driver asked us if we made this trip often (and therefore had some idea of what the fare would be), but I’d made up my mind to be generous. When he asked for $12, which sounded reasonable, I gave him a twenty.

“I promise,” said Will. He wanted me to give him the Apple TV remote, but as he had just caused it to skitter far under the couch, whence Kathleen laboriously extracted it with the help of a book, I thought that I’d better hold on to it. When I expressed concern that he would lose the remote again, he said, “I won’t. I promise.” This was new, new to me anyway. I promise, eh? Perhaps because I’d just been to a quasi-judicial event, I was tempted to ask, “Did you mean to throw it under the couch?” I held firm; the remote stayed in my shirt pocket. Will threw himself on the floor for a moment and wailed, not very loudly, for ten or fifteen seconds. Within two minutes, he was sitting in my lap. (This was a wholly representative tantrum, no worse than a minute shower in Bermuda.) I wondered where “I promise” came from. It’s a formula that Will can’t really understand — can he? Coming from him, it just means, “trust me; I mean well.” Which I’m sure he does. Will can’t promise to be more careful for the long term (the rest of the evening, that is) because, as a happy and healthy little boy, he is swept by occasional gusts of sheer recklessness. But, like one of his grandfathers anyway, he can talk an older game.

***

Truly, madly, deeply attentive readers may detect the note of a literary influence in the first section of this entry (or even throughout); I wasn’t conscious of it while I was writing it but was struck by it while I was taking a break to make the bed. That bit about gangsters and money-launders and “even white slavers” — would such fancy have occurred to me if I hadn’t been reading Caroline Blackwood? I finished her novel Corrigan last night, and I hereby pronounce it the definitive fictional treatment of the problem that grown children have with their widowed parents’ subsequent arrangements. Nadine Conroy is a perfectly realized exemplar of the jealousy and disgust that seize hold of one when a deceased parent is replaced by someone “obviously” wholly inappropriate. The triumph is that the portrait is both accurate and hilarious. If you know anyone who is suffering along these lines, slip along a copy of Corrigan.

Corrigan turns on its head the classic tale of the rich widow and the suave con man. But that’s only the beginning. The novel is written in a flat but beguiling style, and its characters seem to be droll satirical stick figures; we’re lulled into the expectation of a satisfyingly amusing explosion at the end. In the novel’s final chapters, however, Blackwood slowly but steadily raises the backdrop on a quite different reality, one in which the characters are fully rounded. That’s the treat of the thing. Andrew Solomon, in an Afterword, puts it very well:

We, like Corrigan himself, have been duped. The last laugh is on us. We’ve been following entirely the wrong plot for the first three quarters of the book. The novel is wonderfully self-reflexive: we find ourselves the objects of the very stupidity we have supposed to exist among the characters, fooled as Corrigan was by their veneer of simplicity.

I read Corrigan on the Kindle Paperwhite, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to get the NYRB hard copy. This book is a classic.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, March 22nd, 2013 at 11:41 am.