the Columbia fight song his father had taught him with his first words. He sang as he drove, crossing from neighborhood to neighborhood, lights off now, a knife cutting through the darkness. He had shaken Zohar but the Judge remained in the mirror, fragmented into a mosaic of expressions—joy, sadness, disappointment, fear, all mixed as one. He continued to sing “Roar, Lion, Roar!”—the fight song of his father’s alma mater, a school Stone had refused to attend just because. Davka, as his father would have said. And Stone sang and he sang and he sang but his father would not join him and would not go away until, finally, Stone wrenched the rearview mirror off the windshield and tossed it out the window.
Stone’s adrenaline had flamed out. No sense of victory buoyed him, just deep exhaustion. All he wanted to do was sleep, but he was lost. He drove in a fog of confusion until he could not drive anymore and he shut the car down, sprawled out across the front seats, and fell into a restless sleep.
WHEN HIS FATHER was selected to preside over the Court Street Riot trial, during Matthew’s junior year of high school, Matthew was unimpressed; his father’s accomplishments had long ceased to mean anything to him, serving only to draw the Judge farther away. He became even more silent and introspective, rarely uttering a word. He locked himself in his study for hours at a time and slept at his desk. Matthew thought his father was selfish, self-absorbed, and dull, his ceaseless immersion in legal texts and documents antithetical to life. As the trial came closer and protests became louder, calling for the Judge’s ouster, Matthew hid from reporters and sometimes stayed out all night with one of the girls impressed by his newfound celebrity. One girl asked Matthew whether the Judge would go easy on a landsman. Seeing his father on the nightly news, Matthew realized the Judge did not belong to him but to the state, the public, the media—he was his father in name only. It was ridiculous to think this man, larger than life and vibrant on television, was the same silent, moody pile of nerves who holed up in his study as if it were a defensive bunker. But, sometimes, Matthew missed his brooding presence at home, and he went to the Kings County Supreme Court building in downtown Brooklyn. The Honorable Walter J. Stone sat at the front of the courtroom beneath the engraved words: LET JUSTICE BE DONE THOUGH THE HEAVENS FALL, his half-moon glasses pushed down on his nose. He spoke with a firm tone, questioning both lawyers at length. This was the man Matthew knew, the man who had been absent around the house for so many months. He spoke with force and confidence and authority. Sitting there in the courtroom, Matthew arrived at the absurd realization that the Judge was father to all those people present—no wonder he had no time or tenderness for his son.
The defendant, Isaac Brilliant, was slim and wiry in his black suit, slouched in a chair beside his lawyer. Matthew did not remember the jury or the makeup of the spectators, but he did remember the exhausted New York Times reporter slumped next to him, doodling in his notebook, again and again, around the words that would constitute his lead paragraph in the next day’s paper. Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, the words read, “The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”
Not long after, when the selection of jurors exploded into a full-scale controversy and the word jurymandering entered the New York lexicon, Matthew believed his father had gotten what he deserved for his cold arrogance in overriding the prosecution’s challenge to the defense’s jury choice. It was the first time in his life Matthew had seen his father wounded, battered by a world he strode through like a giant, brushing aside problems with ease. The Judge was questioned many times by the district attorney’s office, walking the humiliating media gauntlet, passing signs reading BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS and BASSAM DIDN’T ASK TO DIE as the clutch of TV cameras pressed in on him. The Judge was composed and stoic as he walked, but Matthew realized he had lost control of his personal narrative, his carefully constructed mystique smashed to pieces, when he heard the young television reporters begin each day’s coverage with, “. . . son of notorious gangster Julius Stone . . .” It was then that Matthew finally allowed himself to feel sympathy for his father. Papa Julius had laid this minefield long ago, and only now was the Judge forced to confront it.
A man and a woman from the district attorney’s office rang the Stones’ doorbell one night after dinner. They both showed their DA badges and asked Matthew to answer some simple questions. They related to the Judge’s character and were general questions he finessed with ease—he said nothing of substance. The thin, crane-like woman asked point-blank, “Did your father, Walter Stone, knowingly approve, as a member of the jury at the trial of Brilliant v. State of New York, a man he knew would not be able to fairly render a decision considering the facts presented to him?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“Is that your answer?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“Can you repeat that, please?” the man said, taking notes. “Did your father, Judge Walter Stone, knowingly approve—”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
The Judge walked in the front door as the pair from the DA’s office was leaving.
“What are you doing in my home?” the Judge said to the man, who was fiddling with his briefcase.
“Just asking a few questions. We’re leaving now, Judge Stone.”
He stepped up close to the man and said, “Get out of my house.” Then, turning to the woman, he added, “This is my private home. If you want to speak with me, you know where to find me, but leave my family out of this.” He spoke in a measured tone, belying the irritation he must have felt. “Now,” he said. “Good-bye.”
When they were gone, Matthew sat frightened at the foot of the stairs. His innards steeled themselves, hardened with fear. The Judge lit a cigarette and held the smoke a long time before expelling it into the air. “What did they ask you?” he said, turning to face Matthew.
Matthew told his father everything he remembered, and as he did so he watched the Judge’s face to make sure he did not slip up.
“Is that all?” the Judge said, a long gray ash hanging at the end of his cigarette.
“They asked if you knowingly approved a juror who would not be able to render a fair decision.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
The ash fell to the floor.
“‘I don’t know’?” the Judge said, his voice rising. “When the district attorney’s office asked you if your father knowingly approved a juror who was dishonest and corrupt, your only answer was ‘I don’t know’? What is the matter with you, Matthew? Don’t you have a brain in your head?”
“Dad, you don’t understand.”
“Matthew,” the Judge said, cutting him short. “I don’t think you understand how serious this is. You’re graduating from high school soon—you’re going to be a man. You have to know these things.”
After a moment, Matthew said, “I made a bad choice.”
“Blood is not a choice, Matthew, yet somehow, somehow you managed to circumvent thousands of years of genetics, biology, and history in one fell swoop.” Turning away and speaking as if to a private audience, he said, “He’s a modern miracle, a revolutionary wunderkind. He’s stormed the Bastille and brought down the
