“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.