Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  The kindling was set. The bridge would burn horribly, and fast. She touched his face. “There can never be anything between us,” she breathed. “Not now. Not in the future. I want you to promise me.”

  “Promise you what?” he asked, and the hopelessness in his voice drew her. “You’ve already set the rules.”

  “That’s right. I have. I’m sorry, Eddie. It has to be this way, and—and you can’t ever ask me why.” She had made her speech. Now she had to leave him his dignity. She smiled sadly. “Not that you’d ever want me.”

  But Eddie refused the easy escape that agreement would have given. “I’ll always want you,” he said, and, bowing slightly, handed her into a cab.

  Riding away toward Grand Central, Aurelia knew Eddie would still be standing there under the awning, watching her go. She felt his gaze. She dared not turn and look. If she turned, she would stop the driver, run into Eddie’s arms, and never let him go. She was the Mrs. Kevin Garland. She had responsibilities. And secrets. Secrets she could never share, least of all with Eddie Wesley.

  Yet she could not help herself. She had been in the taxi just a moment when she glanced, as casually as she could, over her shoulder.

  Eddie was gone.

  (III)

  THE BOYS WERE FINALLY FIGHTING, and, sure enough, Zora slipped down onto the sand beside her mother. Julia continued to giggle. That child giggled too much, Aurelia decided, especially around boys. True, Julia was only five, but at ten she would be a terrible tease, and at fifteen she would be a terrible flirt. Aurelia had grown up with girls like that in the orphanage, and a couple of them wound up with babies before they finished high school.

  Mona had better keep a close eye on her daughter.

  “Mommy?” said Zora.

  “Yes, baby?”

  “Why do boys fight?”

  Aurelia sighed. She longed for a cigarette, but Mona did not allow smoking around her children. At night, Aurie smoked on the front porch of their rented house. Mona would sit beside her, offering newspaper clippings about the Surgeon General’s recent report, and asking if she wanted to live to see her grandchildren.

  “The reason boys fight,” Aurelia said, hugging her daughter close, “is that they’re not as tough as girls.”

  “I thought they were tougher.”

  “If they were tougher, they’d find ways to control themselves. They can’t control themselves. That’s what makes them boys.”

  For a little while, they sat there. The fight had subsided. The boys were building again.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, baby?”

  “Why are boys the only ones who get to be President?”

  Aurelia smiled. “Would you like to be President one day?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want a job for smart people,” Zora said firmly, and could not understand why her mother laughed so hard.

  Later that night, the two women left the children with a sitter and had dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water in Portland. A couple of guys hit on Mona, and a couple of guys hit on Aurelia, and a couple of guys hit on both of them at once. Their dessert was interrupted by their waitress, who said she did not want to be a bother, but she had a question.

  “Ask away,” said Aurie, very confused.

  “Somebody said you’re like the wife of that Negro guy? The widow, I mean. You know, the guy who protected Senator Frost? Gave his life?”

  Aurie covered her mouth in horror.

  “I’m gonna vote for him,” the young woman persisted. “Lanning Frost. He’ll be like the best President we’ve ever had? I’m so like grateful? To your husband, I mean. Can I shake your hand?”

  “No,” said Mona, because Aurelia was crying.

  The waitress went away, looking offended. Mona bundled her friend into the car. All the way back to the house, Aurie kept her head pressed into the corner between the window and the seat. She was tired of hearing the story. About how her gallant husband had stepped in front of the car and taken the bomb. Could no one see that the story made no sense? Kevin could not have known about the bomb until it exploded, and by that time it would have been too late to push the Senator out of the way. Why did the newspapers have to invent heroes all the time?

  All of this she said to Mona in a furious weepy ramble, and Mona patted her shoulder and murmured soothing sounds.

  Aurelia did not say the rest of it, the secret only she knew: the other reason it was absurd to think that her husband had given his life for the Senator.

  Kevin had not been an innocent bystander that afternoon.

  He was the target.

  CHAPTER 37

  Denial

  (I)

  EDDIE WAS WRITING about Che Guevara. He had become fascinated by the fascination of American leftists with Marxist revolutionaries, and wondered if they really would like to live in the sort of state that successful revolutionaries tended to produce. It was early October of 1965, and Guevara had just split with Castro and left Cuba. College students could hardly cross the street unless they first demonstrated their knowledge of the difference between Marcuse and Sartre. At his house on I Street, Eddie was trying to craft an essay conveying his amusement. They were all armchair radicals, he insisted. They would all wind up working on Wall Street.

  Gary said his old friend was growing cynical, but Gary was no oracle. Since Erebeth’s death and his takeover of the Hilliman trusts, he had retreated behind a wall of skepticism. About politics. About people. About everything. Gary’s perennial good humor had somehow twisted into sardonic malice. It was not, Gary often explained, that he had rejected his former leftish views. Rather, he had decided that ideology itself was a bad idea, that the only ethical and dependable human attitude was doubt—

  The doorbell rang.

  Annoyed, Eddie looked up from his work. He was not expecting anyone. The bell rang a second time.

  He answered, and found a couple of young people, white, college-age, looking lazy yet alert. Eddie assumed they wanted autographs, or instruction in the mysteries of the universe. Both kinds dropped by without invitation, and both had to be sent on their way swiftly; if necessary, rudely.

  “Mr. Wesley?” said the girl, smiling prettily. “Yes?” “Could you maybe go for a ride with us?” “I’m terribly busy right now,” he began. “It’s about the woman you’ve been looking for,” said the boy. Outside in his driveway, the door to a car stood open.

  (II)

  EDDIE CONSIDERED THE BLINDFOLD MELODRAMATIC, and said so, concealing the deeper truth that he was terrified. Even in childhood, he had never liked having his eyes bound, secretly afraid that he would go blind, like his Aunt Carrie. The car was full of kids. From what he could tell before they bound his eyes, all were white. It occurred to Eddie, too late, that he was entirely at their mercy. He had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that he was in the hands of Jewel Agony.

  They drove for an hour or so, and he tried to figure out whether they were heading into the countryside or just circling around to confuse him. The car clunked and rattled, and the young revolutionaries on either side kept bumping against him. Twice they braked hard enough to slam his face into the vinyl seat back. Another time they pushed his head down toward his lap as if to hide him. At last they stopped someplace noisy and bundled him into another vehicle without unbinding his eyes. This time they slipped glasses over the blindfold. The new car sped off.

  “Nobody’s following me,” Eddie said calmly. “You may safely dispense with these precautions.”

  “Nothing need be true,” said a new voice from the front seat, a male, probably white, certainly much older than the kids, “as long as it persuades.” The man was quoting Eddie’s novel Netherwhite, but the author felt more threatened than flattered.

  “You believe me to be a liar?”

  “I believe you should shut up.”

  The anger rose in Eddie, but he squelched it, not least because it would do him no good. If he ripped off the blin
dfold, they would throw him out of the car. He had chosen this road: the road to Jewel Agony, and to Junie. Having petitioned for entrance to their world, he could hardly complain of his treatment. Eddie was taking a risk, but theirs was greater. He was the famous writer with powerful friends to protect him, and the kids beside him on the seat lived every second in fear of the helicopter overhead, the battering ram against the door, and the rest of their lives behind bars.

  “Why are you doing this?” the new voice asked after a moment. “Why are you making all this trouble?”

  “You know why.”

  “You want to join us?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t want you.”

  Eddie smiled. “I don’t want you, either.”

  An intake of breath around the car, but he had said nothing anybody could argue with. “Then why?” the voice demanded.

  “I want to find my sister.”

  “Who’s your sister?”

  “If you didn’t already know that, I wouldn’t be here.”

  A sullen silence stretched. He had the sense that they were crossing a bridge. He heard banter with a toll-taker, and wondered why nobody noticed him blindfolded in the back seat. Then he remembered the glasses, and supposed he was meant to seem blind. An hour later, the car stopped. The doors opened, and Eddie heard twittering birds. Two voices whispered, an argument he could not quite make out, except that he was pretty sure somebody wanted to send him back. He heard lowing cattle. Farmland. Northern Maryland? New Jersey? He assumed the journey was over, but they led him into another car.

  “Don’t say a word,” said the same male voice, this time alongside rather than in the front seat.

  He did not.

  “There’s no such thing as this Jewel Agony, okay?” the man said. “There never was. The pigs made it up.”

  The pigs. He had noticed this term filtering into the language of the young: a peculiar catchall for police, federal agents, anybody representing law and order.

  “Just sit still and be quiet,” the man said.

  Eddie had the sense that the decision was still being made, even without a spoken word. The car started moving. The silence was thrilling, a tease. She was in the car. Eddie trembled with certainty. His sister was in the car, maybe right next to him, and if he just reached out—

  “Don’t move,” said a female voice.

  Not Junie’s. Caucasian.

  Eddie frowned, turned the other way. Then he remembered: the older man was sitting there. Maybe the front seat, then. But as he tried to lean, the man grabbed his head and made him face the woman beside him.

  “You work for Hoover,” said the same female voice. He had never heard it before, but he would have known it anywhere. “Everybody knows that. You and Nixon are buddies. You’re a spy.”

  He had the wit to obey his original orders. He remained silent. They were climbing a hill, very steep. Maybe they planned to toss him over the side.

  “You’re crazy to come here,” the woman told him, but he already knew that. “Don’t you read the papers? We kill without compunction. A federal informant, sent to spy on us, do you think we’d hesitate?”

  Still Eddie kept his silence.

  “Feel this,” said the male from the other side.

  Eddie felt.

  A gun, pressed into his side, just above the kidney, where even a small-caliber bullet would do a lot of damage.

  “You’re a dead man,” said the woman. She sounded just like her mother. “You shouldn’t be here. Your FBI friends will lynch you.”

  A chuckle from the front seat, although nothing was remotely funny.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she repeated. She was not, he decided, quite sane. “Do you really think she would want you here? Don’t be a fool.”

  “This is our commander,” said the man, and Eddie took the meaning at once: hers was the final authority. From whatever sentence she pronounced there would be no appeal.

  “She’s not here,” the female voice continued. They were headed downhill again. “She’s not anywhere, okay? I can’t believe your FBI friends didn’t tell you.”

  Fear has a way of working its way upward, hotly, from bowels to stomach to throat, like rancid food. And, in the end, it comes vomiting out of your mouth. “Are you saying she’s in custody?” he demanded, rounding on the woman beside him. No answer. He turned the other way, toward the gunman. “She’s dead? Is that what you’re saying? Junie is dead?”

  The car screeched to a halt. Doors flew open. Somebody dragged him out and thrust him to the ground. Grass. A field of grass.

  “Don’t turn around,” said the gunman, prodding the back of his neck.

  Eddie nodded. Although already blindfolded, he shut his eyes. Maybe this was the end after all.

  “He’s serious,” said the madwoman. Eddie wondered what Irene and Patrick would say if they could see their daughter now, waving guns and promising death: the new Commander M, “M” for “Martindale,” not “Miranda.” “M” for Sharon, not Junie. “If you turn around, he’ll blow your head off.”

  Eddie nodded again.

  “We didn’t blow up that bomb. We didn’t try to kill Frost. That was the pigs trying to frame us.”

  “They killed Kevin Garland to frame you?”

  “That fool was like collateral damage. They wanted to kill Frost, and then we’d really be in the shit.”

  He let this pass. “Please tell me about my sister.”

  “She’s a wrecker. We don’t put up with wreckers.”

  Eddie was trembling with fear, but not for himself. Wrecker. He knew that word. A term Marxist regimes used before purging dissenters. Sometimes the wreckers were expelled. Sometimes they were liquidated.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “We didn’t want her any more. We don’t want you, either. Don’t turn around.”

  The gun remained on his spine. Fingers from behind removed the dark glasses and lifted the blindfold. Eddie blinked in the moonlight, careful not to turn. He was on his knees on the grass. The grass was sprinkled with bird shit. The gun withdrew. He heard the car doors slam. The engine gunned. The car sped off. He waited a full minute, then raised his head.

  He was on the grassy median on the other side of I Street from his house.

  They had driven him in a circle.

  CHAPTER 38

  Aurie’s People

  (I)

  BY THE AUTUMN of 1966, life in Ithaca had settled into routine. For most of Aurelia’s life, routine had been her enemy, excitement her friend, but the roller coaster of the past ten years had persuaded her of what most adults pretend to have known all along: children need stability. In Ithaca they had it. The house was a cavernous Victorian half a block from the long pedestrian bridge that swayed gently several hundred feet above Fall Creek Gorge. In the morning, Aurelia laid out cereal and milk and fruit, then dressed while Zora and Locke ate. She walked them to the school-bus stop, taking along Crunch, the shivery beagle they had saved from the pound, who generally did his business on the way back. She left Crunch in his pen behind the house, then headed for work, leaving the station wagon in the garage because spaces on campus were expensive. She crossed the bridge, climbed the steep wooden stairs set into the muddy slope opposite, and strolled through the campus to the English department in Goldwin Smith Hall. She taught her classes, she met her students, she argued obscure literary theories with her colleagues, and about once a week she was asked to justify her presence in the faculty women’s bathroom. By three-thirty she was done, and hurried home to meet the bus, because the school day was arranged, in Ithaca as everywhere in the country, around the assumption that a mother would be home to receive the children.

  There were faculty parties, too, some of them mandatory. The sitter was a gangly teen from next door who played the flute. One of Aurelia’s friends was a lecturer named Megan Hadley, who had been in her year at Smith. Megan taught early-modern literature—that is, literature from three hundred years
ago—and her husband, a goateed anthropologist called Tris, short for Tristan, frequently hit on Aurie, who had been hit on by husbands of friends for much of her adult life. Another suitor was a chubby engineer named Bergson, a shy man who seemed happy simply to moon over her at the occasional lunch. She even had a flowery letter or two from Charlie Bing, ex-husband of her friend Chamonix, insisting that she let him buy a drink whenever she next came to Manhattan. And then there was Lawrence Shipley, the only black professor in the history department, brilliant and beautiful and devotedly single, whose playful overtures she one tipsy night, and never again, found herself unable to refuse. Loneliness can do that, but Aurelia was humiliated. She did not want to be a notch on the handle of a campus Lothario’s gun; and Lawrence was known to talk about his conquests. Mention this one, she warned him as she dressed, and she would have some of her old Harlem friends trim him up, as it used to be called; and Lawrence Shipley, who had never set foot in Harlem in his life, promised.

  She figured he would keep his promise for at least a month.

  Every so often she heard from Eddie. He usually called late at night. Over the scratchy long-distance lines, they kept a careful emotional distance from each other, devoting their conversations to family news. He would ask about the children, and she would ask if there was word of Junie. There never was.

  One afternoon, as Aurelia returned to her office after lunch, she found Megan Hadley camped outside her door, holding a clipping from the Times: had Aurie seen it? She had not. Lyndon Johnson had nominated Oliver Garland, her late husband’s cousin, to be a federal judge.

  “I thought you told me the Garlands were all Republicans.”

  Aurelia managed a sickly smile. “They’re whatever they have to be to get ahead.”

  But Megan wanted outrage. Outrage that any Negro in America could be a Republican. And simultaneous if slightly dissonant outrage that any thinking person could cooperate with Johnson, the great baby-killer. Aurelia’s aplomb bewildered her. Oppression was everywhere. Megan urged her colleague to give vent to her feelings instead of bottling them up. It was time to reject her socialization, said Megan. Aurie thanked her kindly, and, when Megan was gone, stared out the window at the parking lot, wondering if Oliver knew what his cousin Kevin and his Uncle Matty had been involved in.