Wilde Lake(43)

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.

It also was pointed out to me that the school would allow me to have my children board there, when they reached the upper school. I worried that I had somehow transmitted a sense of desperation, of being over my head in those early years of widowhood and authentic single parenting. Don’t worry, we’ll take those kids off your hands when they’re teenagers. My father went to boarding school, but he never would have sent us. And I would never send my children away. When they were younger, only four or five, Justin asked if I would go to college with them. I said yes, and meant it. But I won’t hold them to that promise, much as I would like to.

The oddest thing to me, about my job, this vocation to which I gave my life, is the ritual oath. Of course, they don’t make people put their hands on Bibles anymore, but they might as well, given that more than 80 percent of U.S. citizens identify as Christians. (These are the kind of stats you know when you’re in politics.) But I could put my hand on any book and tell you a thousand lies. So you will have to trust me when I tell you my story is true. I guess I could swear on my children’s lives—but that strikes me as distasteful. Sometimes, I think we hold the truth in too high an esteem. The truth is a tool, like a kitchen knife. You can use it for its purpose or you can use it—No, that’s not quite right. The truth is inert. It has no intrinsic power. Lies have all the power. Would you lie to save your child’s life? I would, in a heartbeat, no matter what object I was touching. Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything.

And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.





JANUARY 17


“So Fred is going to defend the guy and invoke Hicks? What could he be thinking?”

AJ and Lu are at Petit Louis at the Lake, not far from where the beloved Magic Pan of their youth once sat. AJ probably would prefer to be at the Magic Pan right now, if it still existed. Her brother has come to hate restaurants with cloth napkins and wine lists. He also loathes the locavore places that would seem to embody the philosophy he espouses. Instead, he grumbles that they make food precious, another designer brand, only one to which poor people don’t aspire. He’s also not that keen on food trucks, for reasons that Lu can’t be bothered to remember. It’s hard keeping track of AJ’s ethics.