whatsoever. Stone would be reciting the ancient chant only out of guilt; useless obligation, carried along through generations of blood, minted onto his DNA like a brand, the need to soothe the irresistible force tormenting him. But he was not a good son, and could never be a good son. His father was gone—he had missed his chance. Stone could barely form the words of the Kaddish. Burning skeins of acid rose up his throat; his eyes filled with tears. He stopped, trembling in fear, his chest heaving, scarcely human sobs bursting from his open mouth.
Later, after night had fallen, he stared at the boxes that seemed somehow as mysterious as the pyramids of Egypt. Who was his father, after all? Stone knew the broad strokes, the highs and the lows, the triumphs and disgraces, but he did not know why the Judge had been so distant, shattering, in his dismissive treatment of him. He did not understand why he was lionized by so many or what he had still planned to do before the cancer struck him down. An accomplished life, Stone thought, but incomplete.
His father, Walter Joseph Stone, would be forever remembered as the “jurymandering judge,” the New York State Supreme Court justice who had presided over the controversial Court Street Riot trial and been forced to resign over improprieties regarding jury selection. When Stone was younger it had felt like sweet revenge, his father devoured by the hungry media out for blood, but now he was left with nothing but sadness for his father’s tarnished legacy. Stone finished off his joint and mused: Would things have turned out differently if he had, instead of celebrating his father’s disgrace, done something to help ease it?
He knew his father had been born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, son of the notorious gangster Julius Stone. His father had enrolled in Columbia College at the age of fifteen after graduating at the top of his class at Brooklyn Technical High School, and completed Columbia Law School at twenty before becoming the state’s youngest assistant district attorney at the age of twenty-two. He had even been honored by Mayor Robert F. Wagner in a public ceremony for his exceptional service before joining the army’s branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps during the Vietnam War.
It was remarkable how different his father was from Julius Stone, reputed trigger man for the crime syndicate Murder Incorporated. It couldn’t have been easy for the Judge to escape Julius’s toxic influence, the violence, the intimidation.
Stone slipped the Judge’s robe on again and closed his eyes: an entire life in thirty-six boxes. He leaned against a stack of boxes, knees pulled to his chest, rolled another joint, and lit it. As the weed took hold of him, Stone knew he wanted to do something, even if it only meant walking down the street to buy a newspaper. He wanted to get up off the ground, to put on clean clothing, to stand up and shout, but his voice would not come. He wanted to do something important, but he was frightened. Stone had even been afraid to open the boxes to learn what was inside—he knew there were old photo albums stacked between the books, photos of him as a child, his father as a young man and then, later, as the force of nature he had become. Perhaps his mother was in those albums as well. He had forgotten what her face looked like; it had been such a long time. Stone wanted to see those faces again, familiar faces in the proper sense, alive with the possibilities of a future they could not imagine.
The first box opened with a sigh, as if the books themselves were glad to be freed from their confinement. Stone stacked them in neat piles along the wall, his fingers blackening with dust. He opened a second and a third box and stacked the books, washing his hands of grime as he went. By the time he had emptied ten or eleven of the boxes, he finally paused, sweating, flipping through a hardcover biography of Orde Wingate, the eccentric British general credited by many with creating modern guerrilla warfare. Something akin to a shiver seized his body; not cold, but electric, as if he had stuck his finger into a light socket. He was not alone. Somebody stood just over his shoulder, reading the words before his eyes, breathing in his ear. “Who’s there?” Stone called and spun around, but there was no one in the room. The books whispered to him. It was a whisper, an actual whisper, but it came from inside Stone’s head. He did not so much read the words as the words read themselves. The Judge had underlined Wingate’s call to arms: “Today we stand on the threshold of battle. The time of preparation is over and we are moving on the enemy to prove ourselves and our methods.”
His father had been reading that book back in the spring when Stone had first arrived. The underlining was new, done with the blue Uni-ball pen Stone had given his father from his knapsack. Stone closed his eyes, and the words remained before him, illuminated, shimmering in the darkness. “I am so fucking high,” he said out loud and began to laugh before he heard four successive gunshots ring out somewhere down the block. He froze in place, waiting for the police to come, but he never heard any sirens.
Stone unboxed The History of Nations—all sixty-eight volumes, reprinted from the London edition, encapsulating the histories of all nations from Greece to Rome to Persia to France to England—his father had bought as a student at an old antiquarian bookshop on 104th Street, according to the stamp inside the cover of the books. More histories: Josephus, Churchill, Thucydides, Gibbon, a three-volume set called History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Biographies of Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds, the writings of Israel Zangwill and of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, his father’s hero, fluent in eight languages, writer and translator of Dante and Poe, a lawyer by training, a journalist, and above all the most eloquent and forceful voice in Zionism. He found Lincoln; Hitler; Stalin; Machiavelli’s Prince, the pages edged in gold leaf; Clausewitz’s On War in the original German; a signed, personalized copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. He found a first edition of Altneuland by Theodor Herzl, published in Leipzig, Germany, and then slim, elegant volumes of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol; the tales of Nachman of Bratslav; the works of Maimonides; the Harvard classics, all fifty-one volumes; Faulkner’s novels; Tolstoy; Dostoevsky; Shakespeare; the Greek tragedies—all rare or first editions in English.
IT WAS HARD to imagine just weeks before his father died, a man had knocked on the door offering to purchase the Judge’s entire estate: his books, papers, furniture, even his clothing. How did this vulture even know the Judge was dying and that his belongings might soon be available? He could have the furniture and clothing, but these books were the Judge’s children after all, more important than Stone had ever been to his father. Stone at least owed him the respect of taking proper care of his books.
It was true, there were ghouls out there looking to make an easy buck, and Stone, under different circumstances, had no objection to making a sale, but the Judge wasn’t really dying, was he? He’d be needing those books before long. He wasn’t dying, he wasn’t. The inexplicable appearance of this shady merchant of misery was enough for Stone to slam the door in the man’s face, but he deftly slid his foot across the threshold and said, “I won’t take but a moment of your time, Mr. Stone.”
This was the first time anyone had ever called him Mr. Stone, and he realized that one day, like it or not, he would be the only Mr. Stone. He opened the door and the man, seeing the living room lined entirely with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, smiled and said, “Quite a collection.” He produced a wad of cash from his pocket. “I’ll give you fifteen grand for everything. Including any personal papers or documents.” He must have been in his early thirties; he was slim and wore a nondescript blue windbreaker and a Mets cap pulled low over his eyes so they were nothing but shadows. He had the makings of a beard on his angular face and did not offer his hand. There was something familiar about him—his greasy arrogance, his presumptuousness—but Stone could not place him. He’d lived too long in the heart of Connecticut and was afraid he’d begun to think that all Jews looked similar.
“Not for sale,” Stone said.
There were no remaining documents, and the books meant everything to his father. When Stone had arrived in the spring and found the Judge’s filing cabinets emptied out, he had asked the Judge what happened, and his father had told him there were no papers, there never were any papers, and to mind his own business. But Stone had found a receipt on the kitchen table from an information management
