Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  But Eddie was determined not to rush. He was still regaining his balance after the events in Southeast Asia. He sought solitude. He had revived his academic appointment at Georgetown. Mindy had found him a large house on Albemarle Street, not far from Rock Creek Park. All of his furniture had been moved. All of his books had been unpacked. The new house had shelves everywhere. It had five bedrooms. It was set back from the road and screened by trees. Dropping him off, they asked if he needed them to stay.

  He said he did not.

  Alone in an America he did not recognize, he went into the kitchen. Mindy had stocked the larder. He found an apple and stood munching in the window, looking for signs of surveillance. He saw none. But he had come to doubt his perceptions. Since the events in the warehouse, Eddie occasionally saw things that were not there, or missed things that were. A kind of mental flex, he had told the pompous psychiatrist he had consulted briefly at Oxford. A twisting of the mind, as though I am back in the tank of water. Say, once every couple of months. The psychiatrist had nodded indulgently, proposing to get to the root of the fantasy, plainly not believing that the events of the horrible night in Hong Kong had actually occurred.

  Eddie had quit after the third visit.

  And for all that, he had found no trace of Junie. He had been shot at, beaten, and tortured, he had discovered Benjamin Mellor and led Collier to him, but he had not found his sister. Perhaps she really was dead.

  Eddie took another couple of bites of the apple, then tossed the core. He continued to watch the gray street as gray shadows drew out from gray houses. He watched until the trees swallowed them, then watched some more. Full dark, and Eddie could not stop watching.

  Sooner or later, they would come for him.

  (II)

  ON HIS THIRD DAY BACK in the States, Eddie had dinner with Gary Fatek at a steak house on K Street. Gary’s red hair was thinner, his pale body thicker. He had visited Eddie in England twice and India once, and now, on his way to Buenos Aires, had stopped in Washington to welcome his old friend back to the States. He dug into his chop like a man too busy to eat.

  “I hear you’re the big Republican now,” said Eddie, marveling.

  “Nah. It’s just, the family’s that way.”

  “And you, personally?”

  Gary shrugged. “I don’t have time for politics any more. But I gather you do.”

  “If this is about the book—”

  “Nope. Haven’t read it. Don’t plan to. Wars are trivial. Economies are what matter. Erebeth used to say that, and she was right. Never mind.” Hunching forward. “You’ve met Nixon, right? I’ve gotten to know him pretty well. He’s a weird, paranoid man who always thinks everybody’s out to get him. Here’s the thing. I’ve sat with him two or three times since the inauguration. He keeps asking if I’ve heard from you. He’s a pretty obsessive guy, but he’s really obsessed with you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. He wants to know what you have against him.”

  “I don’t have anything against him, Gary. Will you tell him that?”

  “Sure.” Back to the steak. “But I don’t know that he’ll believe me.”

  The next night, Mona Veazie called from Hanover, wanting to see if he might be willing to come speak at Dartmouth. Gary had given her the number.

  “I might,” he said, exhausted.

  “Good. Because I’ve got a girl for you.”

  “You have what?”

  “A girl for you. Named Gwen. Very sweet. You should meet her. Don’t worry, she’s black.”

  Eddie remembered that Mona’s mother, Amaretta, had been not only Harlem’s premier Czarina but its leading matchmaker as well.

  “Not interested,” he said. Kindly.

  Meanwhile, the papers were full of news about Lanning Frost. His rise seemed inevitable. Nixon had been in office two months and already the journalists were handicapping his likely opponents in 1972. The Senator was described as tough and honest and hardworking.

  His wife was described as brilliant.

  One morning Eddie watched Frost on television, being interviewed about the war. “It would hardly be appropriate,” said the Senator, “to second-guess whatever the potential outcome of strategies that I think it would be wrong of me to disclose at this time.”

  The enchanted look on the reporter’s face told the viewers that no insight had ever been deeper.

  (III)

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Eddie drove north on the recently completed Interstate 95 to visit his mother in Boston. He expected to find her shrunken and weak after four years of living without her husband. Instead, he found Marie ebullient, yet guarded by an unusually pensive Marcella, who tracked Eddie from room to room as if expecting him to steal the silver. Marie prepared a huge meal, all the foods her son had loved since childhood. Eddie could not remember experiencing such contentment in the bosom of his family. Not while his father was alive, he conceded guiltily.

  Later that night, he sat in the kitchen with a still contemplative Marcella, who wore a long robe and bunny slippers. She brewed tea. Marcella was tall and stolid and implied eternity, just as their father had. She and Sheldon had married the month after college graduation. They had set straight to work making babies. The siblings traded small talk for a while. They told each other stories about Junie, some of them true. They speculated about where she was now.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. I read what you wrote about the war. I mostly agree with you.” Marcella stirred her tea. “Tell me something, Eddie. If you had a son, and he was eighteen, what would you do? About the war, I mean.”

  The question surprised him. He had never thought about it. Even if he put aside the events in Hong Kong, memories of his own brief experience in Vietnam kept him awake many a night, the fried hand that crunched like chicken bones particularly. He had never for one moment imagined the possibility that his own flesh and blood could actually die in a rice paddy, helmet clutched to his head, or be blown to bits in a sidewalk café. Only other people’s children did that.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a son.”

  “But what if you did?” Marcella persisted.

  Eddie felt trapped. He waited for the flex that caught him at moments of stress, but it spared him this time. “I’d send him to Canada. What else?”

  His sister frowned. “I only have daughters. But my Sarah is graduating from Boston College next year, and my Ruth is a sophomore. If they were boys, well, they’d be eligible for the draft.” She dropped her solemn eyes. “I’d tell them to go, Eddie. I would hate it. I would cry every minute they were away. I hate this war. I think it’s terrible. But I would tell them to go. Not to Canada. To Vietnam. It would be their duty, Eddie. To give something back.” The dark eyes came up again, pained yet unbending. “America has been good to us, Eddie. Our children don’t have the right not to go.”

  “How can you say America has been good to us? Look at the history of—”

  “Look at the present. Where else would you prefer to raise your children?”

  Eddie, who had faced this question many times over the past two years, gave his usual answer. “Did you ever read this story by Langston Hughes called ‘Poor Little Black Fellow’? One of his best, Marcie, and he wrote a lot of great ones. It’s about a Negro boy who’s raised by a rich white family. His father was the family servant, and died in France in World War I. The white family raises the son as their own. They love him, but they make him sleep in the attic, because they think he would be uneasy sleeping among them. They look for a good Negro college for him to attend, because they think he would be uncomfortable at Harvard. They’re trying to help. When the family takes him to Paris after he finishes high school, he decides to stay, because he hates America. The white woman who raised him starts to cry. She says, ‘But your father died for America.’ The young man—he’s not a boy any more, he can make up his own mind—the young man looks at her and says, ‘I guess he was a fool.’ The point is—”

 
“Oh, I get the point, Eddie. I just don’t happen to agree. I don’t happen to think it’s right to take the country’s benefits and then try to make sure the burdens fall on somebody else’s children.”

  “And suppose the war is immoral? What then?”

  “You send your children anyway,” said Marcella, very cool. He had the sense she had spent a lot of time rehearsing the conversation in her mind, but had not been able to have it with anybody else. “You have no right to send somebody else to die in their place. And then you do what you can to stop the killing.”

  “It’s not me who’d be sending them,” Eddie began, but his sister rolled right over him. He had never known her to be so voluble. Or insistent. It occurred to him that the mantle of head of the family had already passed.

  “This is where your lack of faith makes you weaker. Not just you. The whole country. Children become a kind of talisman. Almost a possession. You do not like or trust your fellow man, and you have no one greater than yourself to whom to turn. So you engage in idolatry. Preserve your children’s lives at all costs. Do not, under any circumstances, put them at risk. Not when you can risk someone else’s child instead.” Stirring, not drinking. “That’s not terribly charitable of you, Eddie.”

  “You sound like Dad.”

  Marcella smiled briefly. “I love your novels, Eddie. I’ve read them all. You have a gift. The writing. It’s beautiful. Last year I started reading the book about the war. The Report. Just the first few essays. I couldn’t finish it, Eddie. I couldn’t believe you felt that way about your country.”

  The old Eddie would have fought the point, wrecking the weekend, but the Eddie who had lived through the experiences of the past couple of years only smiled and kissed his big sister good night.

  “I know what you’re really mad about,” Marcella said as she preceded him up the stairs, bunny slippers squeaking. “It’s not America you hate. It’s Junie.”

  Eddie stopped. “Marcie, I adore Junie.”

  “You do and you don’t, Eddie. You love her, sure. But you’re mad at her, too. Not for the bombings—the great Edward Wesley Junior wouldn’t be worried about a few minor crimes. No. You’re mad at her for not getting in touch with you all these years. For trusting other people more than she trusts you.”

  She went on up to her room.

  (IV)

  EVIDENTLY, ALL WAS FORGIVEN, because in the morning it was Marcella who made breakfast, not allowing her mother to lift a finger. Marie sat there beaming. Eddie ate, but only to be polite. He was baffled. His mother should not be this happy. Her husband was dead, her son was notorious, and her younger daughter was a radical bomber sought by the authorities on three continents.

  Yet she was happy.

  It had bothered him all weekend. He could not fathom her joy. Only as he was packing his bag on Sunday did he get it. Marcella’s words on the stairs Friday night struck him like a blow. He sat down hard on the bed, remembering the note Junie had written Benjamin Mellor, still in the safe-deposit box in Washington.

  No point in beating around the bush. He went down to the kitchen and asked his mother if she had heard from Junie.

  Her smile was one of beatific innocence. “Goodness, Edward. I don’t see how that’s really possible. Do you?”

  “I think it’s very possible.”

  “But what a risk, Edward. Why would your sister take such a risk? Don’t be silly.”

  Marcella followed him to the car.

  “You were right, Eddie.”

  “About what?” he asked, probably more harshly than he meant, but his contentment had melted away.

  “It’s not that Momma wants to hide the truth from you. It’s just that Junie asked her not to tell.” A brief smile. “I see I have the famous writer’s attention. Yes. She’s heard from Junie. Junie asked Momma not to tell you, but didn’t ask her not to tell me. Junie never asked me not to tell you, so I think I’m on safe ground.”

  Eddie was scarcely able to control his impatience through this lawyerly digression, but he recognized that he had found, unexpectedly, an ally. Marcella was talking herself into imparting a confidence.

  “She got a note from Junie, oh, four years ago. Just after Dad died. You remember how the FBI was at the funeral?” Eddie did remember. At least a dozen agents outside the church and, later, at the cemetery, with police backup, in case the former Commander M decided to break cover. “Well, just after that, Momma got the first note. She was in Pittsburgh visiting Aunt Sadie, and she came back from shopping one day and found it at the bottom of her handbag. Junie said she was sorry for everything, that she didn’t want Momma to worry about her, that everything was going to be fine. That was all. Not a word about Dad,” Marcie concluded, with a hint of the old disapproval.

  By now Eddie’s analytical self was back in charge. “You’re sure that’s what she said? Not that everything was fine, but that everything was going to be fine?”

  His sister nodded. “Then she sent Momma another note while you were in Vietnam.” Brief hesitation. “Somebody left it in the slot at the church for Mom’s guild. It had her name on it.” Stronger. “Anyway, the second note said things were getting better, and she was happy.”

  “Happy?”

  “That’s what the note said.” The tone suggested that Marcella found this as peculiar as her brother did. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the messenger.”

  Eddie considered. The first note said everything was going to be fine. The second said she was happy. Did that mean that whatever was going to be fine at the time of the first note had indeed become fine?

  He said, “I know Dad’s church, Marcie, and so do you. If there was a note with Mom’s name on it in her mail slot, there are about twelve biddies who would have read it before anybody called to tell her to pick it up.”

  “It was a day she was there.”

  “Mom was at church when the note was left?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you see the note?”

  “No. Momma showed me the first one. The second, well, she just told me about it.”

  Eddie swayed on his feet. The lie was transparent. The second time around, Junie had not bothered with a note. She had visited in the flesh. In the midst of trouble, wanting to reassure, Commander M had gone to see her mother.

  CHAPTER 53

  Conversation in a Coffeehouse

  (I)

  IN JUNE, once more in his reportorial role, Eddie attended the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society in Chicago. Officially, he wanted to see what the true radicals had gotten up to in his absence. Unofficially, he wanted to troll for news of his sister.

  The belly of the beast.

  On the plane, he thought about Aurelia. Her novel had surprised him. It was a throwback to another era, almost countercultural in its celebration of patience and hard work. Just the book that would succeed in an era when Nixon was insisting that there existed a silent majority of Americans who were unimpressed by the revolution in the streets. People thought Eddie had helped her publish it, but this was not true. He had not even read the manuscript. Eddie marveled at its success. A younger Eddie, without Southeast Asia behind him, might have felt a twinge of jealousy, for although Report to Military Headquarters had been one of the biggest-selling books of 1968, it was fiction that defined the writing craft, and he had not produced any serious fiction in five years. The new Eddie saw matters differently. His only goal was Junie. For the current phase of his quest, avoiding any connection with Aurelia was crucial. He could not afford guilt by association. The SDS types were at this time working out a theory of the need for a revolutionary assault on “white skin privilege.” After Aurelia’s novel, they would consider her reactionary.

  Eddie wondered what they would consider him.

  Just to be on the safe side, he gave Mindy and Zach detailed instructions on what to do should something happen to him.

  “Something like what?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back.�
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  The Chicago meeting started out bad and got worse. Speakers were shouted down. Posters were torn down. People talked about burning things down. He was astonished to discover how the left had split in his absence—not merely the armchair radicals from the activists, but, along the fringe, sharp divisions over ideological points that he doubted many of those choosing up sides fully understood. He heard a young man screaming from the rostrum about “Trotskyites” and “wreckers,” and a woman—Eddie could not tell whether they were allies or enemies—groaning about “deviationists.” On the second night, he dined with a clutch of Maoists from Stanford, but two got into a fistfight over the priority of which buildings to trash: should they begin by targeting subjects that had direct war applications, like engineering, or attack the beast’s lair, as one called it, the humanities classrooms where imperialist ideology was rammed down the throats of the impressionable? Eddie sat in his hotel room and wrote in his notebook that the Nixon faction had already won. The silent majority could sit back and relax. The left was dying of its own inconsequentiality. Bad ideas, he wrote, will beat no ideas every time.

  On sudden impulse, he called Aurelia up in Ithaca to say hello, but fourteen-year-old Zora answered, and said that her mom was on a date. Eddie decided not to leave his name.

  (II)

  THAT NIGHT, doleful, he walked the Chicago streets through one of those angry Midwestern rains that strafe the land like an aerial bombardment. He stopped at a jazz club, he stopped at a bar. He listened in on the radicals with their unkempt hair down. He listened for any mention of Jewel Agony or Commander M. He heard none. Jewel Agony had been drowned in the noise of its competitors. At three in the morning, sitting exhausted at an alternative coffeehouse in Lincoln Park, where a series of poets doomed to remain undiscovered moaned into the microphone, Eddie surrendered, accepting that the convention was a dead end. He was heading for the door when he heard his own name being called.