Picture the scene: Clarence Thomas returns home last Saturday afternoon after a few hours of golf, or gardening, or taking yet another peek again at Rush Limbaugh's wedding album (Thomas presided over at least one of Rush's wedding's-the third one, I believe, and not the one with Elton John). Thomas is, we know, the most fun and cuddly of all the Justices-and the rest of them just can't keep him quiet, can they?-and is no doubt drawn by the sweet sentimentality of his nature towards nostalgia.
Imagine his surprise, then, when Clarence saw his dumpling of wife, Ginni-- herself an activist in many conservative groups and a hard-liners on wildly divisive which have in the past caused her to lobby against the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example-sitting at the breakfast nook with a particularly cheery smile on her dimpled cheeks.
She wasn't always happy in the mornings.
Imagine him saying, as he pours the Dunkin' Decaf', "You look happy, Ginni. Morning went well?"
"Yes, darling. All that pesky correspondence that's been weighing me down?" She brightens, even as she speaks. "I dealt with it. I rose early and told myself ‘Now girl, you're just not giving yourself any more excuses! You're going to end the day with a sense of accomplishment so that you and your honey can snuggle up and watch Netflix tonight. We have a choice between ‘Short Circuit' and ‘Ruthless People', by the way. 1986 was a fine years for films, wasn't it?"
Sitting down with a bagel and some fruit, Thomas asks, in the manner of all husbands, for his wife to tell him about her day while eats and reads the newspaper.
She perks right up and hands him a print out of the message she's scripted and left on the machine of Professor Anita Hill up there at Brandeis where Hill is now a professor of law. "I just took a little of our problems into my own hands and decided that it was time for Anita to break the silence and apologize to you properly, the way a woman should."
Imagine Justice Clarence Thomas's face at that moment. Just imagine the look he must have had in his eyes. Imagine the range of his facial expressions as she read the message, the one recorded on Hill's voice-mail in her Brandeis office at 7:30 in the morning that very day, when it was clear that a call placed would be in no danger of being answered; imagine him as he heard the following, as Ginni chirped them engagingly: "I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK. Have a good day."
By the time she got to "Have a good day," don't you think the Justice's head would have been on table? Perhaps banging, softly, ever so softly, on the placemat? Don't you think his eyes were closed by that part, and that maybe there were a few teeth grinding?
"I just said to myself ‘Ginni, old girl, you're not part of that silly old cult anymore" (a word she needed to pronounce carefully around Thomas so that there were no misunderstandings) "And you can choose how to live your life."
"Why did you do this now, Ginni?" The voice seems to come from below the table itself, so deep it is in tone.
"I said to myself, ‘Girl, you want closure. Closure is important for inner-peace. And you want to be able to wrangle with the naysayers at Liberty Central Inc. without having the blot of Hill on Clarence's escutcheon brought into focus. The Hill woman was just a spurned lady who was mad she couldn't get her man the want I could, isn't that right? So don't you think, dear, that it would be the right thing for her to do to say simply that she made a silly mistake all those years ago? And can't she just say it now, this weekend maybe, while she's off from work, so that as I am coming into my OWN, my very OWN political ascendancy, that'll be behind me?"
There is silence, except for the head banging; it remains a soft, light series of "thuds."
The Justice, suddenly, rises and leaves the room.
"Honey, where are you going? We've hardly had a chance to talk! Want me to bring you a can of Coke and we can talk in the other room?"
As he enters his study, closing the door behind him, Ginni hears him saying to the operator "Get me Scalia. Get him now."
