Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  And if Castle’s testament had ever turned up.

  Another time, Mona Veazie came down from New Hampshire to visit—Mona, who had gotten her into the academic world in the first place. She brought her new husband, a quiet schoolteacher named Graves—white, like her old one—and the children, Julia and Jay. They looked less like twins every time Aurelia saw them, for Julia was half a head taller. But girls mature faster than boys, Aurie reminded herself. The two families saw each other often. Locke and Zora called the twins their cousins. While the children chased the dog and each other around the yard, the adults played three-handed pinochle, one of Harlem’s royal games.

  Later, the two women sat up in the master bedroom, watching the late movie on Channel 5 and drinking wine. Mona was maudlin. She did not love her husband, she said, but he kept her warm at night. Aurie refused to bite. She asked instead for news of Harlem. Mona prophesied doom. She was not sure how much longer to allow her ailing mother to live alone at the Edgecombe Avenue townhouse.

  Oh, and there was one other thing. Maybe Aurie had heard the news?

  What news?

  Well, not news exactly, said Mona. A friend of hers with Washington connections had called. The remnants of Agony were said to have gravitated to the San Francisco Bay area. They were joining up with other radical groups to try to give the movement a push. The hard left was thought to be in dire straits. Hoover had informers everywhere. Three members of the Revolutionary Action Movement had recently been arrested, charged with planning to blow up the Washington Monument. Militant organizations were disintegrating. But in Oakland, a new movement had adopted as its name and symbol the Black Panther, formerly used by voting-rights activists in the South, and trying to raise revolutionary consciousness among welfare recipients, janitors, nurses, and other members of what it called “the industrial army.” The Panthers scared people. They wore black berets and black leather jackets. They carried weapons openly, relying on their rights under the Second Amendment.

  Aurie said, “Agony is joining up with the Panthers?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mona. “Neither does my friend. The point is, the feds have good penetration. My friend says they expect to have Commander M in custody in a matter of weeks.”

  Aurelia sat for a few minutes, smoking and thinking. “Do they really think it’s Junie out there?” she finally said.

  “They really do.”

  “Can you imagine her behind bars?”

  “Not really.”

  Aurie blew smoke through her nose. “Eddie says they’ll never catch her. He thinks she’s smarter than they are.”

  “So do I.”

  Before Mona left, Aurie asked if the friend with Washington connections was Gary Fatek. Mona grinned, but sadly. “Gary’s way up there now. He’s out of my league. I hear you have to be God, or at least a President, to get in to see him.”

  “Eddie sees him.”

  “God, or President, or twice winner of the National Book Award.”

  “What I’m saying is, if Gary told you that they think Junie’s in California, then he probably told Eddie, too. He’ll go out there, Mona. He could get into trouble.”

  “Sorry, sweetie. I can only take care of two children at a time.”

  A week later, the Bureau announced with great fanfare the arrest of a couple of members of Agony in Berkeley, California, at what the papers described as a safe house, but when Aurelia talked to Eddie, he told her that the “safe house” was an apartment full of unkempt heroin addicts, and the pair of college dropouts who were hauled in, neither of whom had ever heard of a Commander M, could not have blown up a balloon.

  (II)

  UNLIKE MONA, Aurelia was not a professor—not yet. She was, at the moment, simply a lecturer, a distinction that explained why she worked from a cubicle rather than an office. The department chair had assured her, however, that the assistant-professorship opening up in eighteen months would be hers if she wanted it, and she did. She liked Ithaca. She had used a small part of her inheritance from Kevin to buy the huge house on Fall Creek Drive. Few senior members of the faculty owned houses so grand, but Aurelia did not care about the whispers behind her back. She wanted Locke and Zora to grow up with all she had lacked—a yard, space, the dog, friends next door. Christmas was a gigantic occasion for the family, gifts heaped beneath the tree. Probably she spoiled them. The way they had lost their father, she could not imagine doing anything else.

  Most nights, while the children slept, Aurelia prepared for class or graded student papers. Then, her professional life out of the way and her personal life on hold, she honored Kevin’s memory the only way she knew. She withdrew a diary carefully hidden in one of the messier drawers of her dresser. On its creamy pages she was trying to reconstruct the documents she had found in her husband’s safe ten years ago, and copied, and burned. Sometimes she would recall another word or phrase and add it to the pattern; two days later, she would decide she had remembered it wrong. And yet, slowly, the documents were reemerging. She had copied the words shake the throne at least four times, so she wrote them now on four separate pages, hoping to spark a buried memory. There had been several references to Pandemonium, always capitalized, one to the Palace Council, and several more to someone named Author, or the Author, presumably the intended recipient of the letter delivered to the Dorchester during their honeymoon. She supposed it was possible that her late husband was the Author, but she doubted it. The Author seemed to be in charge of things, and Kevin, for all his virtues, was exactly what Matty had once described: a born second-in-command.

  This was her secret obsession. She had told Eddie a year and a half ago that she would not discuss his theories. She had not mentioned that she had theories of her own.

  Aurelia put the notebook aside. She smiled a little, smoked a little, cried a little. It’s getting worse, Kevin had said in their last conversation. The whole Council is scared. Minutes later, standing next to Lanning Frost, he had been blown to bits.

  Aurelia took up the diary again. She turned the smooth pages, studying her notes. She made a correction here, added a word there. Bit by bit she was rebuilding. Bit by bit she was forgetting the pain of losing Kevin, whether she had loved him or not.

  The only other person aware of the diary was Tristan Hadley, Megan’s husband. He had discovered the volume back when she used to keep it in her downstairs study rather than her bedroom. Aurelia had cooked dinner for the Hadleys and three other academic couples from her department. During dessert, when the talk turned to nineteenth-century literature, Tris had taken himself off to wander around the house. Like many intellectuals, he hated conversations in which he could not shine. When his absence became embarrassing, Aurie had gone searching. She found him in her study, watched by Crunch, his tangly tail wagging with peculiar canine approval. Professors enjoyed peeking into each other’s home libraries, for the pleasure of critiquing the books on their shelves. But Tristan had pillaged her desk and was leafing through the diary.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Figuring you out.” He handed the book back before she could slap him. “You’re so delightfully mysterious.”

  “How dare you go through my private things!” she sputtered, unable to come up with anything better.

  “I dare a great deal, Aurie. Maybe one day we can dare together.”

  “Tristan—”

  “What are all those notes about, anyway? The Author? Shaking the throne? It’s like a secret code.”

  “None of your business.”

  His eyes lit up. “You’re writing a novel. Like your friend Edward Wesley.”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s the other way around. You found them somewhere, and you’re trying to figure them out for some reason.” One of the risks of dealing with Tristan was that his mind worked a good deal faster than anyone else’s. Except when he was busily experimenting, as he put it, with psychedelic drugs to expand his range of consciousness. “That explain
s why there’s so much repetition and so many cross-outs. A mystery.” Rubbing his palms together. “How exciting. You’re solving a mystery. Maybe I can help.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  He pointed to the diary, which she had tucked under her arm. “Some of the phrases looked familiar.”

  “Why do you do this, Tristan? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “I love you. It’s as simple as that.”

  Aurelia groaned. “You’re a married man.”

  “So?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything? Don’t you know the legend of Tristan?”

  “Yes. But I’m not your Isolde. Now, will you please get out of here?”

  “Certainly,” he said, patting her bottom as he passed, and so drew a slap after all.

  Not the first time. Probably not the last.

  (III)

  THEN THERE WAS THE CONSTANT STREAM of letters from Callie Finnerty, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, the bubbly blonde who had taught her how to mother. Callie loved the word “great.” Callie’s life was going great. Her husband’s career was going great. Her new house in Scarsdale was great. Her three children were growing up great. Callie’s only fear was that her eldest would be drafted: other than that, things were great, great, great. Kevin had always looked down his nose at Callie, and Eddie would have had a grand old time mocking her letters. But there were nights when Aurelia sat alone in the kitchen, sipping what she always swore was her last glass of wine, envying the simplicity of Callie Finnerty’s life.

  Simplicity. Normality.

  Aurelia had other friends whose lives seemed to her normal—Sherilyn in New Jersey, Claire on Long Island—and she marveled at her inability to achieve the same. She could have chosen another husband. It needn’t have been Kevin, or even Eddie. Plenty of men would have married Aurie over the years, had she given them the smallest encouragement, and lots of them would have provided her a simple, happy life, where she could write letters burbling about how everything was going great.

  Mona Veazie, whose degrees were in psychology, often warned that the words “what if” were a signpost on the road to depression, especially if you treated yourself to a couple of drinks along the way. But loneliness is too powerful a force to be countered by mere effort of will, and sometimes “what if” is all we have.

  CHAPTER 39

  The American Angle

  (I)

  JANUARY OF 1967 was a month of peculiar contrasts. The state of Georgia, supposed heart of the “New South,” swore in a new segregationist governor. The United States Army was accused of conducting secret germ-warfare experiments, and the Pentagon announced yet another new offensive in Vietnam, and yet another new call-up of reserves. In Kenya, a paleontologist claimed to have found the oldest remains of a human evolutionary ancestor, but three American astronauts died in a fire on the launch pad, so perhaps science was not clicking along at quite the expected pace. A month later, the great Edward Trotter Wesley Junior managed to squeeze all of these events into a clever piece in The Nation, drawing a series of broad themes to which he referred, collectively, as the American Angle. Only Aurelia, tut-tutting over the essay as she sat, snowbound, in Ithaca, knew the source of his inspiration, remembering how his younger sister used to distinguish between the Eddie Angle and the Junie Angle. The American Angle, wrote Eddie, involved the determination to stay far ahead of everyone in the world but, at the same time, to keep everything exactly the same. We wanted endless technological progress that would never alter society one iota. We wanted to dominate the world without suffering any consequences. If America failed to change the angle from which it looked at life—wrote Eddie—then the nation was at a moral dead end.

  Aurelia took the American Angle to be just another silly Eddie Wesley idea, which would pass, as all his nonliterary brainstorms did, without notice. He had written that complimentary piece about Nixon in 1962. Two years ago, he had criticized black leaders for growing too chummy with their corporate donors. Last year, he had argued that the Vietnam War might be necessary, because Communism had to be stopped. Nobody remembered those essays, Aurelia told herself. Nobody would remember this one.

  She was mistaken.

  She first sensed something was up when Lawrence Shipley, the historian, mentioned the piece at a faculty seminar. The following week, a congressman from California went to the House floor to read into the record a formal condemnation of “this man Wesley.” Nixon called Aurelia to say, after a bit of huffery, that under the circumstances he did not think his campaign could use Eddie after all. He still admired Eddie, and liked him, but publicly—

  Aurie wanted to laugh, but it was too late. Events were rolling. A Southern legislature adopted a resolution of condemnation. A respected Times columnist weighed in, urging restraint. One of the news weeklies did a cover story about how the nation looked at the world: IS THERE AN AMERICAN ANGLE? Eddie’s picture was on the cover, superimposed over images of Vietnam, student protests, and the Apollo 1 fire. Furious letters to the editor accused him of profiting from the tragedy.

  And, just like that, Edward Wesley was not a novelist any more. He had become exactly what he had never sought to be: a public figure. Lecture bureaus called. So did other magazines. His publisher wanted a nonfiction book, a longer version of the same essay. The idea of writing a nonfiction book, Eddie told Aurelia when he escaped briefly to a tiny stone cottage she found for him on one of the farther Finger Lakes, scared him out of his wits. So did the idea of being recognized on the street. Besides, he needed all his energy for the search for Junie. They had not said she was dead, he explained, voice rich with hope. They had only said she was no longer part of them. She could be anywhere.

  Actually, they had this conversation in bed. Aurelia had finally broken her firm rule. The cottage was musty and damp and very near the water. Ice formed at the bottom of the windowpanes, on the inside. The kerosene heater worked intermittently. Aurelia had rented the place for the month of March from a Binghamton automobile salesman, a hunter who would be up later in the season. She thought the cottage atrocious, but guessed that Eddie, who assessed physical surroundings differently from most people, would find it rustic and inspiring. She was right. She was showing him around the place when their bodies brushed accidentally together, once, a second time, and that was the end of resolution. She had managed to keep her promise for nearly two years.

  “Don’t tell Gary,” Aurelia said, lying naked in his arms for the first time in over a decade. “He’ll just tell Mona, and Mona would laugh her head off.”

  “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “No,” she said, but got out of bed anyway. The heater was working for the moment, and the cottage was sweltering. In a couple of hours, it might be freezing. Like marriage, Aurie decided. She found her Virginia Slims. Ten years, she was thinking. More. This was not the awkward young man starting out. This Eddie was less gentle in bed but more confident. She had started out trembling with anticipation and wonder, but the look in Eddie’s eyes told her he had known all along this day would come. Now she stood in the window, tugged aside the tattered curtain, and looked out at the frothy gray winter water. The sweetly acrid cigarette smoke calmed her. Aurelia watched the waves. Eddie, studying her forty-year-old body, thought he had never seen anything so beautiful.

  “So—what happens now?” she asked, acting with her back.

  Eddie yawned. The drive from Washington was eight hours, and he had made it without stopping. “Probably I leave the country for a while. It’s not a matter of safety,” he added hastily. “It’s just, right now, I can’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd.”

  “I meant, to us. What happens to us?”

  “Us. Us.” Savoring the word, Eddie, too, slipped out of bed. He padded over and hugged her from behind. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Asking m
e or telling me. Because, if you’re asking me, I say we get married. But I have a hunch you’re going to say no—”

  “That would be correct.” She heard the sadness in his voice but could offer no comfort. She blew a smoke ring, then a second.

  “Then don’t ask me what happens next,” he said. He kissed her nape. “Tell me what happens next.”

  She turned, looked into the eyes that had yearned unashamedly for so long. “For the moment, we go back to bed.”

  It was late morning, she had no classes today, and the children were at school, so the moment was long indeed.

  (II)

  BUT IT ALSO ENDED, as all such precious moments do. Aurelia picked up her watch from the bedside table, squawked, blundered around looking for her clothes. She promised to call him later, but the cottage had no phone. The nearest was the booth at the Sinclair station a mile down the road. Eddie promised to call her instead. Racing back to town in the station wagon, Aurelia could not believe what she had allowed to occur. This was not just some man. This was not a stupid fling, like the one with Lawrence Shipley. This was Eddie. Her Eddie, yes, from Harlem, but the great Edward Trotter Wesley Junior, too. There were a thousand reasons not to be involved with him, from his present notoriety to the fact that if today’s slip ever became known, Sherilyn and Claire and the others would decide that the old Harlem rumors were true, that Aurelia and Eddie had been messing around on the side all through her marriage to Kevin.

  And there were other complications, complications she could never make him understand.

  Aurie cursed and reviled herself, sulking silently for much of the evening despite the children’s efforts to lighten their mother’s mood. She yelled at the dog. When Eddie finally called, around ten, she was ready to bite his head off. She had prepared a speech, and even managed to get through most of it, but somewhere along the line began sobbing instead. There had been a time in Aurelia’s life when she never cried. Now she seemed to do it once a week.