Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  Her follower came, too.

  This one was a woman, a sallow brunette, and her solitariness, her lack of family, made her conspicuous. So did her whiteness. At this time the Vineyard, an island off the coast of Cape Cod, was not as well known to the public as it later would be. Segregation had long ago driven the middling and upper classes of the darker nation to create their own summer colonies: Sag Harbor, near the easternmost tip of Long Island; Atlantic Beach, in South Carolina; and a few strategic and secluded spots in the western portions of Connecticut and Massachusetts and in upstate New York all had their innings. But the Vineyard enjoyed a certain durability, as well as the relative seclusion granting it an exclusivity: it was difficult to get there, and expensive to stay. Claire and Oliver Garland had bought a house in Oak Bluffs in the early sixties, and spent every summer in residence. Aurelia and Kevin had been their frequent guests, but the summer of 1969 was Aurie’s first visit since her husband’s death four years ago, and, this time, Aurie wanted a place of her own.

  “You should buy before the prices go up,” said Claire.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Aurie, still uneasy with wealth, who had been driving the same station wagon now for six years.

  The family arrived in early July. The weather was splendid. Each morning, Aurelia would wake the children for a march down to the small strip of beach below the house. She called this dawn swim “bathing,” because Kevin had. More likely than not, she would spot her pale shadow at the same beach moments after arriving. Because she had so enjoyed Funny Girl last year, Aurelia took to calling the female shadow Streisand, and her male counterpart Sharif. Once the family settled into routine, Streisand might even be waiting for them, swimming in leisured figure-eights by the time Aurie and the children reached the sand. Or they would make a pre-lunch expedition to the playground in the middle of the Highlands, and Streisand would be sitting on the bench, reading a magazine. The children loved the dangerous spinning wooden platform with high metal rungs they would hold, shrieking with glee while Aurelia whirled it faster, faster, Mommy, faster! One day, while the children were on the teeter-totter, their mother grew bold. She walked over to Streisand, sat beside her on the bench, and offered her a cookie from the bag she kept for the kids.

  Aurelia was not sure what to expect. Would the woman brandish a badge? A gun? Would she demand gruffly to be left alone, or, embarrassed, slink off into the muzzy Vineyard sunshine?

  Streisand did none of these things. She lifted her eyes from Newsweek, offered a smile of complicity, and declined politely before returning to her magazine. Aurie returned to her children. When she looked up again, her shadow was gone.

  In the afternoons, rain or shine, they would walk or drive to town, where the children would ride the carousel, the Flying Horses, most of the steeds original, dating to the nineteenth century, Zora waving and giggling, Locke trying to snatch the brass ring from the wooden arm in the corner and win the free ride, Aurelia snapping away with her Kodak Instamatic. Sometimes Streisand showed up. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes Aurelia would sit up half the night in the bedroom of her rented house, trying to figure out how much was real and how much imagined. She wished she could talk about it, but there was nobody to talk to. She could not call Eddie and was afraid to call Mona, who enjoyed, at odd moments, diagnosing her. She tried Gary Fatek, but did not enjoy Mona’s streamlined access. She could not fight her way through the buffers that protected him from the hoi polloi. No matter how many flunkies promised to pass on her messages, he did not return the call.

  She did manage to reach Callie Finnerty, her friend from Mount Vernon, and was warmed by the unadorned friendliness in her voice. They talked about their children until Aurelia decided they had better stop, because it was daytime, and the rates were high.

  Meanwhile, the magical Garland name combined with Aurie’s own growing stature led to invitations to visit most of the salons on the Island, but she turned everyone down, unless Locke and Zora were invited, too. Dorothy West, one of the giants of the Harlem Renaissance, owned a house not far away, and welcomed the children happily, even telling Aurelia tartly that she could, if she liked, send the children in her stead. Adam Clayton Powell had once summered nearby, but no longer came to this part of the Island. The house was now owned by his first wife, Isabelle—not the same wife Aurie had met in Harlem—who fed the children cookies and lemonade, and told stories of the days when the Garland family was nobody. But most of their visits were to the splendid summer cottage of Claire and Oliver Garland. The house was a rambling Victorian, fifty years old if a day, located on Ocean Park, with a lovely uncluttered view across untidy grass to the Nantucket Sound and the Cape beyond. Oliver, now on the federal bench, was able to get to the Island only rarely, even in the summer, but Claire and the four children were in residence from the middle of June through the end of August. The children ranged in age from Addison, the eldest, who was about to start college, to Abby, the youngest, a fierce little ponytailed tomboy of eight. The younger son, Talcott, obviously had a crush on his cousin Zora, but it was to Mariah, Claire’s fourteen-year-old daughter, that Zora naturally attached herself. For much of that summer, the two girls were inseparable, whether hanging around one of the two houses, swimming at the beach, or strolling along Circuit Avenue in search of the perfect ice-cream cone. Aurelia found herself alone, often, with Locke, who, freed of his sister’s influence, grew more serious, and asked the thoughtful, searching, utterly unanswerable questions that occur to children: “How can you be so sure Daddy is in Heaven? Don’t some people go to Hell?” and “If you get a new husband and new children, will you forget us?”

  One day, on a hunch, Aurelia waited for the two girls to leave the Garland house for their regular two-block walk to Circuit Avenue. When five minutes had passed, she slipped out and started hunting for them. She tracked them with ease to Darling’s candy store, and the reason she knew the girls were inside was that pale Streisand, clad in shorts, was outside, fiddling with her bicycle.

  As Aurie marched past, the watcher waved her hand in friendly salute.

  (II)

  GARY FATEK RETURNED THE CALL during the family’s second week on the Island. Explaining her difficulty, Aurelia felt herself sounding more than slightly crazy. If she was not careful she would begin chattering about the Author and Pandemonium, and how the Palace Council planned to shake the throne but now had lost control of the Project. She would begin explaining why she thought the bomb had been intended for Kevin, not Lanning Frost.

  But Gary, who somewhere along the line had misplaced the sense of humor they all remembered from the old days, listened to her story of surveillance with the same gravity he no doubt brought to corporate acquisitions.

  “What exactly are you asking me to do?” he said when she was done.

  The question took Aurie aback. Wasn’t it obvious? Was he weaseling out of their friendship, perhaps on the ground that he had done enough already? “Can you find out who it is?”

  “I can try.”

  Again she noted the wiggle room Gary left himself. She was on the screened porch behind the house. There was a plug for the extension. Zora and Mariah were at the picnic table, whispering giggly confidences. Locke was inside reading a book. Aurie thought she saw movement in the trees that screened the backyard, but suspected she was imagining things.

  “When will you know something?” she asked, hoping to box him in.

  He answered with a question of his own. “Have you talked to Eddie yet?”

  “Eddie?”

  “About why Nixon seems so fixated on him.”

  Aurelia needed a moment to catch up with the swift change of conversation. “No, Gary, no. I haven’t had a chance.”

  “It’s important, Aurie. We really need the answer.”

  We? “I told you, he’s not taking my calls. I know, I know, you said it’s to protect me. But he’s still not taking them.”

  “Too bad.” A long sigh, or perhaps it was just the scrat
chiness of the long-distance carrier wave. “Fine. Don’t worry. I’ll see what I can do.”

  About Streisand and Sharif? Or about Aurelia and Eddie? There was no way to ask, because Gary had hung up. He was too important these days to waste time saying goodbye.

  That night, as Aurie sat in bed poring over her notebooks, she heard a footfall on the landing.

  In the doorway stood not her shadow but her son, Locke, in his pajamas, barefoot and frowning.

  “You’re making noise,” he said. “You’re keeping me awake.”

  The boy’s expression was distant and unreadable, reminding her of Kevin that night, holding the shoe and demanding an heir. She shivered. She must have spoken some of her hypotheses aloud. The wooden walls of their rickety house were tissue-thin. “Mommy’s just doing some work, honey. I’m sorry if I kept you up. I’ll go downstairs.”

  But Locke, still pensive, came over and hopped onto the bed. His mother snapped the notebook closed as if hiding pornography.

  “Is it a secret?” he asked, hazel eyes searching her face.

  “Is what a secret?”

  “Your work.” Her son touched the cardboard cover. “What you were doing that woke me up. Is it a secret, Mommy?”

  Aurelia felt weak, silly, exposed. She did not understand who was gazing at her out of those young eyes. Somewhere she found words. “Yes, honey. It’s a secret.” She swallowed hard, put the book aside, took him by the hand. “Everybody has secrets sometimes, honey.”

  “Is it a good secret or a bad secret?” he asked as she led him back to his own room.

  Oh, Heaven! Oh, help! “A good one,” she lied. Locke crawled back into bed. Aurelia drew the Superman comforter up to his neck, kissed his forehead. “You’ll like it, honey. I promise.”

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “I don’t like secrets.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “Aunt Claire’s kids say I’m going to be rich when I grow up. Am I? You shouldn’t keep that secret if it’s true.” The lilting voice was severe. “You should tell me.”

  “Oh, honey—”

  “I have secrets, too.”

  She stood in the doorway, scarcely breathing. “What secrets are those, honey?”

  Her son giggled. “If I tell you, they won’t be secrets.”

  Aurelia felt those clear, questioning eyes judging her as she pulled the door behind her. Locke liked it closed.

  (III)

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Aurelia and her children were invited to Ocean Park along with three or four other families to watch on television as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. After dinner, the adults played pinochle and the younger children played hide-and-seek all through the house. The talk turned from the war to Teddy Kennedy, who, two nights earlier, had driven his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick. A young woman in the car with Kennedy had died. People spoke of the event in mournful tones. He was our best hope to beat Nixon, someone said. Now that’s gone. Oliver Garland kept a prudent silence. He was a Republican, like all the Garlands, in the tradition of the old Negro ruling class. In Harlem of fifteen or twenty years earlier, voting Republican had been nothing to apologize for, but those days were dead. People speculated on who else might run in 1972, now that Kennedy’s chances seemed doomed. Muskie, of course. Maybe Frost. Not Humphrey, whose support of the war had left him damaged goods.

  They asked Aurelia what she thought. Everybody knew her side of the family was close to Nixon.

  “I don’t follow politics,” she said, eyes on the table.

  Come on, Aurie, they insisted. Who does Nixon most want to run against? Who’s he afraid of?

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  Oliver changed the subject. There was a rumor, he said, that Nixon was considering taking the nation off the gold standard, a revolutionary act that would reverberate through every economy in the world. What did people think?

  The answer was the special sheepish smiling silence with which we greet the warbling of the very brilliant, or the very crazy. But Zora, sitting nearby because she was bored with hide-and-seek, said after a moment’s thought that it would mean everybody was just pretending to have money. Like kids playing store, she said.

  Everybody laughed but Oliver, who nodded unhappily and said, “Exactly.” He turned to Aurelia. “Budding genius,” he murmured. Everybody laughed again, but Oliver was serious.

  The raucous party wound down to breathlessness as Armstrong’s moment approached. Everybody wanted to be cool and cynical, even to mumble about how the money that went into Project Apollo could have been better spent feeding the hungry, but nobody wanted to miss it. The idea of no longer being confined to Planet Earth made the whole world heady. Even the stoical Oliver Garland seemed infected by the hysterical quiet. Not a word was spoken as Armstrong drifted down the ladder, his image a grainy gray and white. His boot touched. When CBS flashed the logo ARMSTRONG ON MOON across the grainy image of a human being standing on the lunar surface, then cut away to a helplessly smiling Walter Cronkite, half the group was in tears. Everybody applauded. Aurelia felt oddly sad, as if we were not so much escaping our planet as deserting it. Conversation began swirling once more. Aurelia missed Eddie. She missed Matty. She missed Kevin. She missed her old life—

  Her ears perked up.

  Someone had just remarked that the astronauts were sitting where we dare not soar. Sitting where we dare not soar. A paraphrase of a passage from Book IV of Paradise Lost. Or were they simply the works of her fevered imagination? Tuning in once more, Aurelia could not figure out who, among all the brown faces, might have uttered the phrase. If indeed anyone had.

  Later, as the party began to break up, she managed to snare a moment with Oliver, the two of them alone in the small first-floor library.

  “People will talk,” said the judge, but he smiled.

  “I wanted to ask you about a piece of family history.”

  “Of course.”

  “It involves your uncle.”

  Oliver nodded. He wore glasses with gold rims. He slipped them off and polished them with a silk handkerchief. “Please,” he said.

  “I know this is going to sound weird, but bear with me for a minute. Did Matty ever mention a big meeting in the early fifties? Something about—well, there would have been, um, white men and black men, talking about a project—”

  Another nod. “Sure. The meeting up at Burton Mount’s house. Right here in Oak Bluffs, on Winemack, just off New York Avenue. Not far from where you’re staying, come to think of it. It’s still there. The ranch with the white picket fence. This would have been—let me think.” He clucked his tongue, trying to remember. He seemed entirely untroubled. “I would guess around 1951, 1952. Yes. It was the summer of 1952, because Claire and I had married the year before.”

  “Were you there?”

  “At my wedding, yes. At the meeting, no.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  He put his glasses back on. People called Oliver the Judge, with a capital “J,” not only because of his job but because of the weight of his mien. In the old days, he had been Ollie. These were the new days.

  “I wasn’t that close to my uncle,” he said. He drummed a fingertip against his lip. “Uncle Matty and Burton Mount were very close. Even when I was a boy, I remember how, after a few drinks, Burton would float some crazy idea—going back to Africa, say, or starting an uprising, in the name of racial justice—that kind of thing. Burton would float these ideas, and Matty would shoot them down. Too impractical. Too expensive. Burton Mount was a dreamer. Matty was more the realist.” Again Oliver smiled. “As a matter of fact, they had an argument at my wedding. My father was alive then. It was at the reception, and everybody’d had a few. Burton said that if we really had any sense—the colored race, he meant—we’d do what the white folks do. We’d find a way to get everybody so scared they’d have to do what we wanted. Uncle Matty asked how we’d do that exactly. Burton said it wouldn’t be to
o hard. All we needed was commitment. My father broke it up. He said that commitment was what got people put into insane asylums. I don’t think Burton was terribly amused, but—”

  “There you are,” said Claire, bustling into the library. She seemed alert, and nervous. Aurelia could understand that. She was a widow, and available, and had become, despite her best efforts, a woman of no certain reputation. Oliver kissed his wife on the cheek. “I’ve been looking all over for you, dear,” said Claire. “Lisle and Betty want to say their goodbyes.” As her husband slipped away, Claire turned to Aurelia. Her voice was low, and sweet. “I think Mariah would like your Zora to spend the night. Would that be all right with you? Of course, we’d love to have Locke, too. He and Talcott get along so well. You could pick them up in the morning. Even the afternoon, if you like.”

  Aurelia was barely listening. She was exhausted, and trying to remember why she had ever married into the Garland family. “Yes,” she said, faintly. “That would be fine. Thank you.”

  “Not at all, dear. Not at all. It would be our pleasure. Your children are such a joy. Oh, there is one other thing.”