AJ didn’t ask our father any questions about his taciturn gloominess. Instead, he did all he could to distract him from his funk, telling stories about practice-Bash had been trying to impress a cheerleader and ran straight into a wall, Davey shot free throws in the way girls are taught, dropping the ball between his legs and arcing it underhand. He had made five baskets in a row that way, AJ said, on a bet. Stories like that, harmless and aimless.
Our father smiled absently, picked at the pork chops that Teensy had tried to defrost in cool water, not entirely successfully. (I’m not sure if most people had microwaves at the time, but I know we didn’t. Didn’t and still don’t. My father loathes them. It’s a principle with him, not having a microwave. He says time is not meant to be manipulated that way.) At one point, he almost poured ketchup on his salad, but my warning came just in time. It was odd enough that we even had bottled dressing on the table. On a typical night, my father’s salads were an evening ritual, that kind of eccentric family thing that makes a kid proud and embarrassed at the same time. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and dressed the salad at the table in a battered wooden bowl, pouring oil and vinegar, squeezing a lemon wedge. The bowl and the glass cruets were his only family heirlooms, along with the planter’s desk in his bedroom. When his grandfather died in the early 1970s, my father had driven down to Virginia and returned with these items, nothing more. He called his salad bowl and cruets his “lares and penates.” For years, I thought that was Latin for oil and vinegar.
“What’s up?” I asked AJ in a hoarse whisper as we cleaned up. Teensy always left as soon as dinner was on the table, and it fell to us to tidy the kitchen each night. True, this was little more than rinsing things for the dishwasher and putting away leftovers. But given AJ’s busy life, I did this alone more often than not and I bridled at the unfairness of it all. There was so much unfairness in life, especially when one was the youngest, and a girl. I planned to change that one day. I was going to be an astronaut or a president, maybe an astronaut and then the president. And here we are, more than thirty-five years later, and we have plenty of female astronauts and we’re within spitting distance of a female president. But you know what I consider true progress? The fact that we had a female astronaut disturbed enough to make that famous cross-country trip in adult diapers, intent on killing a romantic rival. When your kind is allowed to be mediocre or crazy-that’s true equality.
“There’s been an appeal,” AJ said. “That man who killed Sheila Compson. He’s filed an appeal.”
“What do you mean?”
“He says the state withheld information about a key witness, someone who can confirm that he dropped her off alive, just as he testified, and that her shoes were in a rucksack. Dad said something-intemperate to a television reporter.”
“Something cold?”
“Not temperature. Intemperate.” AJ, still doing PSAT prep, wedged a lot of big words into his sentences for practice. “He lost his temper. And you know he never gets angry, he prides himself on that. But the TV reporters got to him before he heard and he was caught off guard.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, he said”-AJ looked around, lowered his voice anyway-“he said ‘That son of a bitch is lucky he’s not on death row.’”
I know, it sounds quaint now. Son of a bitch. Small children probably say it for laughs on cable channels. But it mattered at the time. So many things mattered that don’t anymore. Remember, Ed Muskie’s presidential hopes had been torpedoed by tears only a few years earlier. “Son of a bitch” at least had the advantage of being masculine, but it was not something a future attorney general or congressman or senator should say. Intemperate, as AJ characterized it. Our father had been intemperate.
There was an editorial in the Beacon, although it didn’t really seem to say much in the end, other than to appeal to all elected officials to uphold the standards for public decency. The real controversy was that our father had been steadfastly against the death penalty, which had only recently come back in to use in Maryland after a series of constitutional challenges. He said he would, of course, uphold the laws of the state, but he was personally opposed to capital punishment. Now here he was, seemingly contradicting himself, wishing a man dead because he had dared to appeal. An unfair interpretation of events, but his political rival was under no obligation to be fair. For the first time in his public life, my father’s gracious persona had cracked and he was not beloved.
And he had not, as many realized, addressed the central argument of the man’s appeal, which was that there was a witness who would testify that she saw Sheila Compson get out of the man’s car near the highway, just as he had said all along. This was a serious charge. Detectives maintained that they had interviewed the witness and found her not credible. My father said he didn’t even know about her.
And the witness was unreliable. She told a different story from the one she had told three years ago. Back then, she claimed she saw Sheila at the concert, did drugs with her in the bathroom. Now she was trying to say that she was at the rest area where the killer dropped her off, that they hitched the rest of the way together and Sheila Compson definitely had a rucksack. She said she lied before because she did not want her own parents to know that she hitched to the concert. Still, her story should have been made available under Brady, the Maryland precedent for prosecutors withholding evidence.
But her story fell apart now, as it had fallen apart then. What about those other drivers who picked up Sheila Compson? They were adamant that she had no rucksack. And the new girl took detectives to the wrong rest area when asked to retrace her steps. She couldn’t even tell them what songs were played that night at the concert. The state’s attorney’s office is not obligated to make false statements part of the discovery process. The guilty man remained in prison for life, and my father, true to his principles, never pursued the death penalty in any capital case, even when that would have been the popular thing to do. He was thrilled when Maryland moved toward a de facto suspension of the death penalty, then vacated it entirely in May 2013. My father was a Quaker, in his own way, a religion he had embraced after leaving military service. But his interest in Quakerism extended only to the occasional-the very, very, very occasional-meeting at the Quaker society in North Baltimore. I don’t think he ever attended after the move to Columbia. He left AJ and me to make our own religious decisions, which is to say, we had no religion at all. And I was fine with that, and my children are fine with that now that I’ve abandoned Gabe’s plan to have them bar and bat mitzvahed. When Gabe died, I discovered that religion offered me no comfort, nor was it much use to the twins, so young at the time. When I started researching private schools in Howard County, I didn’t even realize that the one I chose had Quaker origins, but it pleased me when that was pointed out at my first visit.