Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “Moms!” said Vanessa, louder this time.

  “Keep your voice down, honey. What is it?”

  “Look.”

  “Look where?”

  Vanessa stretched a slender arm to point past her mother, toward the only white mourner not related to Nadia, a fierce-looking woman with a thick tangle of black hair, and an expensive scarf so sloppily knotted that Julia guessed the woman had donned it in a moving vehicle and made the funeral with minutes to spare: although in truth she had been there when they arrived.

  “What about her?” said Julia softly, trying for the sake of politeness not to peek too obviously. The woman seemed terribly angry, as if her day had gone terribly wrong, but tying your violet Hermès silk scarf in a car, poorly, will tend to do that.

  “She didn’t like him very much.”

  “She what?” Two pews ahead, a stout dark matron in elaborate Sunday hat turned and glared. Julia cringed. “And keep your voice down.”

  “Kellen. She hated Kellen.”

  So did every other woman he ever dated, or tried to. “Professor Zant or Mr. Zant. How can you tell that?”

  “Look at her face, Moms,” murmured Vanessa, who possessed her mother’s talent for reading other people, and her father’s certainty that you had to be most kinds of fool to disagree with the conclusions of so brilliant a brain. “That’s not missing somebody. That’s checking to make sure he’s dead, so you don’t have to kill him all over again.”

  “Come on, honey. Why would she be here if she hated Kel—Professor Zant?”

  Vanessa continued to stare, ignoring her mother’s commands to stop. Twice she seemed about to explain. But, nine months after the fire, there remained moments when, for all her charm and chatter, Vanessa got tangled in the whirlwind of her peculiar mind and could not manage her intended words. She dropped her sharp chin, settled back against the worn polished pew, and shut her eyes in confusion, even if it looked like prayer.

  (III)

  OUTSIDE, in the sunshine, flowing from one group of chattering relatives to the next, never identifying herself beyond her name and the claim of being an old friend, Julia lost sight of her daughter. Vanishing was among Vanessa’s specialties. Vincent Brady described the habit as natural, born of a need for control and independence, but Lemaster said she was obstreperous. Julia refused to panic, reasoning that the girl could not go far in an unfamiliar town, and made her way over to Nadia to offer condolences. The ex-wife had hard golden eyes. Whatever her politics back home, she was exhausted from so much exuberant blackness. Julia perceived at once that the woman did not need another hug, and so shook her hand instead. Nadia, upon hearing the name, grew chilly and dismissive. Kellen and Nadia had not even met back when he had whatever he had with Julia, and yet the woman looked ready to fight. Julia wondered what Kellen had told his wife, and when. A part of his charm in a woman’s life was that you always believed what he said; a part of his terror was that you always knew you shouldn’t.

  Julia spoke briefly to rugged Seth, who asked her to come to the house later on: “I got something Kellen would of wanted you to have.” He gave a ferocious wink that promised to make the visit worth her while. Now she knew where Kellen had learned it. “Dress casual.” Turning, Julia saw Vanessa around the side of the church, laughing easily with a bevy of kids her own age and younger, Nadia’s scrawny son among them. Whatever Vanessa was saying had the boy smiling. Julia smiled, too. People always adored her daughter on first meeting and even second, but that third one could be a mess. Her smile faded as she remembered the precocious child who had loved piano and ballet and Sunday school, who devoured books of word games instead of sweets, whose special smile was reserved for her mother alone. Then, although she tried to resist, her mind skipped to the terrible night last February when Vanessa burned the Mercedes.

  Lemaster had been out of town as usual, and Julia had to face the early hours without him. The first officer on the scene, a baby-faced old man of thirty who had never seen anything like this in his life because the Landing had no crime to speak of, asked Vanessa what she had done and why she did it, not the way the courts prescribe, and surely inadmissible, but never mind, the case would never go to trial. The former straight-A student, by then somewhere in the B-minus range or worse, shrugged her slim shoulders, never quite looking at him, and said, voice dull with lost hope, Why not? Then, gazing at the conflagration, blood smudging her wrists, the hint of a smile tugging at her lips, she added, Isn’t it the most awesome thing? At the hospital, they strapped her down for two days, trying one sedative after another until they got the dosage right. Waiting for her husband to return, Julia sat in the corridor with a Sister Lady or two, listening as Vanessa begged for somebody, anybody, to please, please come and kill her.

  “Julia?” said a soft voice. “Mrs. Carlyle?”

  Relieved at the distraction, she swung around, and found herself face-to-face with the wild-haired woman who had sat near them in the pew. The anger had vanished, but the redness in the stranger’s sallow cheeks proposed that it was on call twenty-four hours a day. The Hermès scarf was if anything more crooked than before. She looked to be about Julia’s age, and her bearing suggested that she had seen a lot of life.

  “Have we met?” said Julia, with her mother’s hauteur, because strangers had no entitlement to use her first name. “Ms.—uh—”

  “Mallard,” the woman said, and indeed she displayed a birdlike fussiness, mouth flaring as though she might at any moment quack, satiny hand brushing Julia’s like a feather. “Mary Mallard.”

  “How did you know Kellen?”

  “You mean, what am I doing here, given that I’m white?” Julia blushed, and there turned out to be space on Mary Mallard’s ducklike countenance for a smile after all. “I’m not one of his women, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, no, we were working on a project together. We didn’t finish. Too bad.” A lift of the long flat chin. “You missed the wake.”

  “We just flew in this morning,” Julia explained, unexpectedly apologetic. Whatever Mary Mallard’s profession, she excelled at putting people off their ease.

  “I know. I expected you last night.”

  “Expected me?”

  At the curb, mourners were piling into their cars for the wailing trip to the cemetery. Mary Mallard fiddled with her scarf. “I only had time to collect one of the pieces. I need the other three.”

  “Pieces of what?”

  “The surplus.”

  Julia felt like a simpleton at the genius convention, but perhaps it was the sun. “I’m sorry. The surplus what?”

  “I’m a writer, Mrs. Carlyle. I’m a little surprised you haven’t heard of me.” From anyone else this would have been a pouty complaint, but Mary was only stating fact. Her fingers poked at the tangly hair, but it was hopeless. The jutting mouth gave her a comic look that Julia knew to be a deception. Mary Mallard was a very serious woman, whose clear, skeptical eyes knew you were lying before you did. “I do investigative reports.”

  Julia’s tired brain finally drew the name and the face from hundreds of hours of insomnia-fueled late-night talk shows. “You do those scandal books. Who really killed JFK. The plot against Martin Luther King. Things like that. Conspiracy theories.”

  “I like to take a closer look at things that the rest of the media prefers to bury, yes.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t read any. They’re not exactly my cup of—”

  “Please don’t pull that Ivy League superiority crap.” Tone still calm, as if reporting the weather. Vanessa, over by the side of the church, was sneaking looks at her mother, obviously wishing she could listen in. “Kellen trusted me completely. So should you.”

  “What am I supposed to trust you with?”

  “Come on, Julia. The surplus. Capturing the surplus. That’s what Kellen called it.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He said the buyers’ utility functions were interdependent, and that was going to help him capture the su
rplus. He shared some of the surplus with me. He said you’d have the rest of it.”

  Julia shook her head. “This is news to me. And it isn’t even in English.”

  “Kellen had a scar on his face. About here.” Gentle fingers touched Julia’s cheek beneath the right ear. She shivered, not from the caress, but from the memory. She knew exactly where the scar was, and where it came from: her fingernails. She had been trying, with reason, to gouge Kellen’s eyes out. On television a couple of years ago, busily lying about his childhood, he had called it a souvenir from a gang war. “Just a tiny white circle. You’d hardly notice if you didn’t know it was there. But Kellen showed it to me.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m telling you so that you’ll trust me. I really was close to Kellen, Julia—may I call you Julia?—and we really did work together.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The thing is, he only gave me the photograph.” Shifting her weight, she drew a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, glanced around, then thought better of the urge. “Well, the photograph isn’t enough. It doesn’t prove anything. Kellen knew that. He said it was just a teaser. So he slept on the sofa. So what?”

  Julia wondered whether she was logier than she thought, from rising so early and driving so far, or whether the journalist really was making as little sense as she seemed to. “I’m sorry, Ms. Mallard. Mary. I’m not sure what we’re talking about here.”

  The ducklike mouth turned down. “Really? Well, that’s unfortunate.”

  “What’s unfortunate?”

  “I thought you would have the other three pieces. I’m sure Kellen said so.”

  “If you would tell me what other three pieces you mean—”

  Mary shook her head. “If you’re lying to me, that’s one thing. If you’re not—” She shrugged. “Nice meeting you anyway.”

  “But—”

  The writer had already turned away. Now she swung back. “I’m going to skip the cemetery, Julia. I’ve had as much Kellen as I can take, I think.” Bushy eyebrows drew together. “There’s just one problem. If you don’t have the other pieces of the surplus, who does?” A puzzled shake of the head. “He seemed so sure.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

  (I)

  FROM THE CEMETERY, Julia and Vanessa made their way to a lovely Victorian bed and breakfast on North Tenth Street, to shower and change in a room of Versailles-like proportions, so sparsely but tastefully furnished it was like being outdoors. Vanessa enthused over the gold leaf on the beveled bathroom mirror, and Julia’s practiced eye labeled it nineteenth-century, Louis XVI style, probably made by hand in New Orleans, and, certainly, worth a bit of money. For a moment, she thought of offering to buy it, for antiques were her fifth or sixth love, and she knew quality. The gilding was directly on the glass—a rarely seen process known as églomisé—and the mirror included a transparent panel at the top with another gilded design painted inside. Sometimes life with Lemaster felt like gilding on glass, too: the rest of the Clan envied her perfect marriage, but Julia knew its slick, shining fragility. She peered closer. Mirrors were her thing. Granny Vee bought them everywhere she went, and the collection in her Edgecombe Avenue mansion had once been the pride of Harlem, but most of them wound up in France with Julia’s mother, who sold them piece by piece, along with anything else of value she could put her hands on, in order to write checks to organizations pledging to end war, poverty, ignorance, oppression, and hatred, preferably by next month.

  Julia ran her fingers along the filigree, wondering, absurdly, if the intricate scrollwork might conceal a microphone. She had no idea why she was thinking this way; Mary Mallard must have really spooked her. Remembering her purpose, she asked Vanessa what she and the other kids had been talking about.

  “Oh, you know,” she said, the fingers that now and again lived lives of their own stumbling over the fastener of the Mikimoto choker until Julia helped her. To Lemaster’s consternation, Julia refused to wear fakes, or to allow her daughters to, because, she said, the Clan would notice. “Just old stories.”

  “Stories about Professor Zant?” She was still looking at the mirror, studying the lovely églomisé. The Eggameese, Vanessa had called it as a toddler, after once mishearing her mother on the telephone with a dealer, complaining that a particular églomisé was too loud, and had for a time imagined it to be a snarling night crawler who lived in her bedroom mirror: Mommy, Daddy, I’m scared, the Eggameese was looking at me!

  “About the colleges down here and stuff. History. They have really cool traditions and everything, ghosts, this killer tornado a few years ago, famous battles. Stuff like that. Did you know they evacuated the whole town in the Civil War?”

  Appropriate African-American umbrage. “Probably just the white people.”

  “Yeah.” Like the rest of her generation, she could not have cared less. “They have this famous park. Oh, Moms, listen.” Vanessa’s gray eyes lit up. She was speaking, as she often did when her strange brain leaped into overdrive, much too fast. “They should call it ‘A Hailed Park.’”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an anagram of ‘Arkadelphia.’” Anagrams being her special talent, and special love.

  “You did that just now? In your head?”

  Vanessa, bristling, missed the point. “Well, it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.” Her irritation faded, and the shoulders sagged again. Vanessa loved playing with words. Lemaster thought she wasted her mind on these games, but Dr. Brady encouraged them. Julia thought of anagrams as ghostly mirrors of words and phrases, some of them gilded. “Anyway, they asked me if there were any stories about where we live, and I told them all we have is snow.”

  Julia’s next question came out nervously, because the Clan taught the presentation of the family to the world as perfection. To air your dirty laundry was a treasonable offense. “You didn’t tell them about…about Gina?”

  Vanessa crinkled her nose and grinned. “Oh, Moms, come on. You know how Gina hates when I talk about her.”

  “Right. Right. So you’ve said.” Both returned to their dressing, the daughter serenely, the mother uneasily. Julia dared not say more. She and Vanessa quarreled constantly, as adolescent girls and their mothers do, and Julia reveled in these rare moments of peace.

  Gina Joule, according to one theory, was the cause of Vanessa’s peculiar mania. The other view held that Vanessa’s obsession with Gina was only a symbol, a sort of Jungian manifestation of a deeper trauma. Gina was seventeen, like Vanessa, a resident of the Landing, also like Vanessa—and her father, like Vanessa’s, taught at the university. As a matter of fact, Merrill Barnes Joule had been the beloved dean of the divinity school: another connection. Merrill Joule had even been a leading candidate for president of the university, but events had overtaken him. Gina was a shy, creative child, as Vanessa was, her only true experience with the opposite sex having begun in the fall of her eleventh-grade year: that is, about the time Vanessa had her own first date. She had Vanessa’s height, moderate smile, and slightly gangly grace, for Vanessa kept an enlargement of a newspaper photograph of Gina atop her dresser until Dr. Brady urged her, Julia begged her, and Lemaster ordered her to take it down.

  Whenever Vanessa unexpectedly vanished for an hour or two, she would explain that Gina needed her, and leave it at that. True, Gina was white, and Julia had never forgotten her mother’s dictum about finding her children black friends. Gina’s skin color, however, was very far from being the largest problem in the friendship between the two girls. Nor was the largest problem that Vanessa had surprised everybody, including her teacher, with the last-minute announcement a year ago that she had changed the topic of her term paper for AP United States history—she had decided to write about Gina. No, the largest problem was that Merrill Joule had been in the ground a good quarter-century, and his daughter, Gina, had drowned at the town beach back when a stamp cost eight cents, Cokes were a dime, and Leonid Bre
zhnev ran the Soviet Union.

  (II)

  IT WAS THE TERM PAPER, of course, that had started all Vanessa’s problems, far too much to demand of eleventh-graders, which was what Vanessa was when she flubbed the paper and burned the car. Advanced Placement American History asked the unreasonable. So Julia believed, anyway, and, less agnostic on the matter of her daughter than on the matter of the God she professed every Sunday at the adamantly defiant Saint Matthias, she clung to this view in the face of contrary arguments by doctors, teachers, her august husband, even Vanessa herself, who insisted, a year later, that she still wanted to finish the research. The paper had earned an embarrassing C+ because, although the text was elegantly written, its use of sources, said Ms. Klein, was thin—and Julia, who had read it, agreed.

  A year ago, Vanessa had been an honor student, with ambitions not unlike those of her older brother, who left high school at sixteen to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The intervening months had been painful ones for her résumé. Her test scores were still high, but, between her behavior, her arrest, and her rapidly dropping grades, the college counselors no longer knew what to counsel. Vanessa had said more than once that she would happily attend the state university, or even a two-year college, but Lemaster, the immigrant, was in matters educational a considerable snob; as, for that matter, were Julia and most of the Clan.