Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  Eddie switched off the set.

  “We might be facing eight years of him. No need to start now.”

  “Second the motion,” Aurie answered, but weakly.

  She sat very straight, watching the man she loved pull the neatly wrapped box from its hiding place. He had not offered her a ring in almost a year. It was time for him to ask her, time for her to refuse even though she could not tell him why, time for him to grow first hurt, then angry, time for them to exchange words that could not be withdrawn, time for them to spend a chilly night in separate beds before she left at first light.

  Aurelia steeled herself as he settled beside her, box in hand. He did not extend his arm.

  “Eddie,” she began.

  He kissed her gently, to shush her, then kissed her again.

  Aurelia turned her head away. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  But Eddie was smiling. The box had not budged. “I’m going to give you this,” he said, “in December.”

  “December?”

  “Right after Christmas. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”

  “Please, Eddie. Don’t do this.”

  He kissed her again, taking his time. “Remember what Granny Vee told you about how patience is a virtue because your future lies ahead of you? Well, she was right. We can be patient, Aurie, because in December you’ll say yes. Right after Christmas.”

  “No, Eddie. I won’t.”

  “You’ll be going to Mona’s, right? Like you always do?”

  “Probably,” she said, feeling soft and vulnerable, irritated at the ease with which he could make her feel this way.

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know why you won’t marry me.”

  (II)

  FOR FOUR MONTHS, Aurelia wondered. She taught her classes, she tried not to hover over her son, she made notes for a new novel. But at night, as she lay alone in bed in the house on Fall Creek Drive, sleep eluded her. Aurelia had never been a night owl, but now she conducted clandestine conversations with Mona in the wee hours. Eddie doesn’t know anything, Mona assured her over and over. He’s bluffing. He’s just trying to rattle you. But Mona sounded rattled herself. “You’re the one who dragged me into this,” said Mona one windswept October night. “I’m not sorry, sweetie—I’m glad—but you’re in a funny position to come to me with second thoughts.”

  After that, Aurelia called less often.

  That fall, she saw Eddie twice.

  The first time was in late September, when they served together on a panel at Duke on the future of Afro-American fiction. Everybody knew of their relationship, of course, and their hosts had offered to let them share a hotel suite, but they took separate rooms. At the panel, the two famous authors disagreed heatedly on whether the writers of the darker nation should simply tell stories, as Aurelia thought, or use their work to push an ideological agenda, as Eddie insisted. The astonished audience wondered what had happened to everybody’s favorite literary couple. That night, their lovemaking was so fierce it was almost combative, and afterward, Aurelia asked Eddie what he was fighting against.

  “The past,” said Eddie, dressing to return to his own room. “The present.”

  “Not the future?”

  He shook his head. “Our future is going to be wonderful.”

  “Eddie—”

  “I promise. After Christmas, your last excuse will disappear.”

  The second time she saw Eddie was in late October. She had just finished her graduate seminar, and was crossing the Quad in the company of a student. The woman was white and flaxen and dedicated to the literature of the darker nation, which had been virulently suppressed, as she put it, by the white male literary establishment, which saw black people as simply a lower form of woman, or perhaps the other way around—Aurie could never get it straight. The student gesticulated wildly, raving about how the poetry of Eloise Bibb had never been sufficiently appreciated. As they passed the brooding statue of Andrew Dickson White, the university’s co-founder, there was Eddie, lazing on the crumbling stone bench with its optimistic inscription: ABOVE ALL NATIONS IS HUMANITY.

  “The poetry of Eloise Bibb,” Eddie said—to the graduate student, not to Aurelia—“is unappreciated because it is entirely derivative.” He smiled at the young woman’s confusion. “You should select another topic for your dissertation.”

  In her office in Goldwin Smith Hall, Aurelia fought to keep from laughing. She glared as hard as she could. “You’ve never heard of Eloise Bibb in your life.”

  “True.”

  “Bibb was a genius. Especially for her time, writing in the South.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You know Nancy recognized you. Poor thing. The great Edward Trotter Wesley just told her to pick another subject. Now she’ll have to start over.”

  “You’re the great Aurelia Treene Garland. You can set her straight.”

  Aurelia sat down. Another part of her was still angry from North Carolina. “What do you want, Eddie? What are you doing here?” She shoved papers around on her desk, frantic to keep her hands busy, lest they hug him by mistake. “I thought you were going to Zaire for the fight. Aren’t you doing an essay for Rolling Stone or something?”

  “For Saturday Review. I’m leaving tomorrow. I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Foreman is going to destroy him.” She did not know why she could no longer have a real conversation with the man she had loved all these years. “Ali could be injured, Eddie. Seriously injured.”

  “Aurelia—”

  “I can’t stand the thought of him going out this way.”

  “Will you stop for a minute and listen?”

  “All right. What is it?”

  Unbidden, Eddie moved a stack of student papers and sat in a rickety chair. “I wanted to tell you, before I left. I’ve done the cleanup work. It’s over.”

  “The cleanup work?”

  “I went to the Vineyard. The librarian was very helpful. She pulled the newspapers from the summer of 1952. The Council was smarter than we thought. They hid the meeting in plain sight.”

  “How? It wasn’t a fund-raiser for Dick. Oliver told me. You remember. I don’t think he would lie.”

  Eddie smiled briefly. “I think Oliver was having a little fun with you. True, it wasn’t a fund-raiser for Nixon. It was a fund-raiser for Elliott Van Epp. Nobody on the Island would pay the slightest attention to a Republican Senator raising money from his rich buddies.”

  “But Nixon—”

  “He isn’t mentioned in the stories, Aurie. Not until a couple of weeks later. It seems he was an unannounced guest. In more ways than one, I’m betting. I’m sure Matty brought him, to impress Burton.” Serious again. “Not counting Nixon only two of the men mentioned in the testament are still alive. I’ve visited both. They won’t talk. They’re afraid. They’re old, and they’re afraid.”

  Aurelia was playing with a gold pencil. “Maybe they should talk. Maybe we shouldn’t sweep it under the rug.” Then she saw his point. “You and I know what happened at that meeting, too. Should we be afraid?”

  “There’s nobody left to be afraid of.”

  “Yes, there is. The same person they’re afraid of. Lanning Frost.” She remembered Eddie’s empty face when they met at the church. “You said he can’t hurt us—”

  “He can’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ll tell you in December.”

  “Eddie—”

  “After you say yes.”

  Aurelia rubbed her forehead. She felt a migraine coming on. “Please stop, Eddie. I’m not saying yes. Not now, not in December, not ever. I can’t.”

  His smile was weatherproof. “Well, kiss me goodbye anyway.”

  She did. But only for a while.

  (III)

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, at a dinner party in the suburb of Cayuga Heights, she found herself seated beside Tristan Hadley, now happily divorced, who still o
n odd occasions came sniffing around her. Tris dominated the table, as he always did, and tonight he wanted to talk about Lanning Frost, whom he planned to support for President next time around. Aurelia suffered in silence until somebody pointed to her, reminding the table that her late husband had worked for the Senator.

  “Kevin just raised a little money for him,” she muttered, hardly lifting her eyes.

  After dinner, Tris Hadley walked Aurie to her car.

  “That was clever of you,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “Pretending that your husband was less than he really was.”

  Aurelia, who had been keeping half a step ahead of him on the leaf-strewn street, the better to avoid his hand on her elbow, stopped and swung around. His self-important blue eyes had a hungry flicker. Steady, she told herself. Calm down. Tris is just having his fun. You’ve seen the names of the men who were at Burton Mount’s meeting, and none was a Hadley.

  “Kevin was a Republican all his life,” she said. “As far as I know, Lanning was the only Democrat he ever supported.”

  “What your husband did for him was a little bit beyond the call of duty.”

  Again Aurelia swayed on her feet. But no. No. Surely he only meant what everybody else believed, that loyal Kevin had thrown his body in front of Lanning’s.

  “He wasn’t a hero,” she said. “He was just there.”

  “All I’m saying is, I see why you’re anti-Frost.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Sure you are. It’s in your eyes. Your voice. You can’t stand him. It’s because you blame him, isn’t it? For Kevin.”

  “What?”

  “I understand, Aurie. Believe me. I’m here if you ever need to talk.”

  Aurelia should have wept. Or slapped his arrogant face. Instead, she laughed. To their mutual surprise. Threw her head back and howled at the magnitude of Tristan’s error.

  “You’re a silly man,” she said, more warmly than either of them would have expected. At least he had made her feel attractive, at the very moment when she had begun to wonder. “Sometimes you can even be sweet.” She got up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “But, please, Tristan, dear, try to get it through your swelled head that I am never, ever going to bed with you.”

  She slipped into her car, leaving him on the sidewalk. Heading back to Fall Creek Drive, Aurelia wondered what Eddie thought he knew, and how he intended to make her marry him. She remembered the night back in college, when Mona had taken too many pills. Aurelia had dragged her unwilling friend to the hospital, bearing her bleary invective. A week later, fully recovered, Mona had promised Aurie that when the day came, she would do as big a favor in return. A few years ago, Aurie had finally asked. Mona had come through. Hugely. Secretly. Aurelia shivered. If Eddie had somehow uncovered the secret—

  But it was impossible.

  She hoped.

  (IV)

  EDDIE WAS AWAY for two months. After Zaire, where Muhammad Ali unexpectedly knocked out the formidable George Foreman in “The Rumble in the Jungle,” Eddie returned to Kampala to lecture at Makerere University, but by this time the college once known as the Harvard of Africa had fallen under the sway of President Idi Amin, who had exiled many prominent members of the faculty, and Eddie left after just two weeks. Depressed, he wandered. He spent a few days in London, a few more in Paris, and a week visiting friends near Toulouse, where he was thinking he might buy a cottage. At each stop, American intelligence took a look, because he was still on their watch lists. His sister, the dangerous radical, had never been found. Although her organization had died, and the search for her officially stood down, there remained the hope that she might turn up. And Eddie, who knew exactly what was going on, had his fun leading the watchers into the dankest alleys in the chilliest hours of the wettest nights, only to return to his bed without having spoken to a soul.

  Nobody guessed that Eddie was following the itinerary of Aurelia’s honeymoon with Kevin Garland nineteen years ago; and not even Eddie could have said just why. He supposed he must have hated Kevin back then, and a part of him had nearly hated Aurelia for marrying him. But Aurie had stayed with her husband for ten years, and Eddie refused to believe she had been after the Garland money. No. Aurelia had come to love her husband. She had, unknowing, even changed him. She had turned Kevin Garland from a supporter to a skeptic of the Council’s mad plan, and he had been blown to bits for his doubts. So much horror, for the sake of success. Wesley Senior had been righter than he knew twenty years ago, when he had written his son that the upside-down cross might be a symbol of devil worship.

  Eddie’s only bad moment came one night in a bar in Marseilles, where he was buying drinks for suspicious Corsican sailors, soaking up color for a scene he was considering for his next novel. He was struggling to memorize a wonderful story one of the men was telling in several languages at once, when he thought he saw, off in a shadowy corner, a lighter flicking rhythmically on and off before a hard white face topped with blond hair, but when he looked again the man was gone. Later, awake in his hotel room, longing for Aurelia, he told himself that George Collier had no reason to follow him. The man in the bar had been somebody else, and only Eddie’s nerves made him imagine the killer’s face. Collier had handed back the testament, shot Benjamin Mellor, and pronounced his own part in the proceedings done with. Yet, if he had lied—

  The questions and doubts chased Eddie into sleep.

  CHAPTER 68

  The Opposite of Truth

  (I)

  ON THE SNOWY SECOND MORNING after Christmas, Eddie arrived at Mona Veazie’s house on North Balch Street in Hanover, New Hampshire. He had gifts from Africa for all four children: colorful kente wraps from Bonwire for Julia and Zora, a Masai warrior’s headdress for Locke, and an Umkhonto spear for Julia’s brother, Jay, who, to his mother’s chagrin, was keen on joining the military.

  For the two grown women he brought nothing.

  The seven of them lunched in town, Eddie’s treat. He kept looking at Mona’s children. So did poor Locke, whose crush on Julia was palpable, and hopeless. Julia, already a flirt at fourteen, played to him shamelessly, but Eddie knew neither mother would ever allow a relationship to develop.

  Too risky.

  After lunch, the children went off in Mona’s four-wheel-drive to ice skate on Occom Pond. Eddie announced that he and Aurelia were going for a drive. Mona looked grim but only nodded. She had known this day was coming. They all had. Three minutes after leaving the house, the occasional lovers crossed the Connecticut River on the stone bridge connecting Hanover to Norwich, Vermont.

  “Where are we going, honey?” Aurelia asked several times, but Eddie never answered.

  The house lay just north of Main Street, on the western edge of the village green, a small, neat, whitewashed clapboard that could be lifted from any New England town and dropped into any other with nobody the wiser. They sat in the driveway for a moment. The mailbox said G. CULLEN.

  “What are we doing here?” said Aurelia. “Whose house is this?”

  “It belongs to a woman named Gwen. Gwen Cullen. She teaches art at the local elementary school.” Eddie glanced at his beloved, who was staring wide-eyed at the house and nibbling on a fingernail. He had never seen her so nervous, not even when they faced Collier’s gun at Jumel Mansion. “She’s a friend of Mona’s.”

  “A friend?”

  Eddie nodded. “Mona’s been wanting me to meet her. I assumed she was trying to set me up.”

  “Set you up? You mean, with a girlfriend?”

  “That’s what I thought. But now I’m pretty sure it was guilt.” He opened his door. When Aurelia followed suit, he put a hand on her arm. “Wait here.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you know why,” he said, and got out of the car.

  The walk from the driveway to the front steps was probably fifteen feet, but it was the longest of his life. Through the window he saw a neat living room, all chintz and fluff. A chubby black cat
watched incuriously from the sill. It took him a year to lift his hand to the doorbell and the rest of his life to push. The sound was a melodious twinkle. When nothing stirred, he rang a second time.

  Still the house was silent. But somebody was home. He had spotted a car in the garage, and a shadow at an upstairs window. He would wait. Standing on the step, hands on hips, he glanced across at Aurie, who was nibbling harder on her nail. His breath gathered and danced and vanished in the crystalline air. He wondered if—

  The chain rattled, and Eddie spun in place.

  The pale woman who opened the door had put on a lot of weight since Eddie had seen her last, but last was almost two decades ago.

  “Hello, sis,” he said.

  (II)

  THEY SAT in the chintzy living room surrounded by abstract watercolors, pale pastels in soft New England shades, many pierced unsubtly with bolts of bright red. They had not hugged. They had barely spoken. Junie had selected an overstuffed armchair, and waved Eddie to the sofa. The cat was in her lap, and she was letting it paw at a bright-blue ball that she would then snatch out of its reach.

  “Her name is Mira,” said Junie.

  “Hello, Mira,” said Eddie, less sure of his purpose than when he first rang the bell. Maybe the Beretta his sister had been holding against her hip was the reason. The gun lay now on the side table.

  “It’s short for Miranda.”

  “I figured.”

  Another long moment, Eddie watching his sister tease the cat. She had done a lot of teasing these past seventeen years, leaving notes for poor Benjamin Mellor and for her mother, but never once contacting her brother. The room was thick with books. The shelves were packed, and volumes were heaped on the tables, most of them fiction. Eddie spotted none of his, but both of Aurie’s. There were no newspapers. There was no television. This was Junie’s world: novels, the cat, her own artwork, and days spent teaching small children. She had constructed a shelter of the imagination, protection not only from the past but from the present.

  And she had a gun in the house. At least one.

  “What are you doing here, Eddie?” she finally said, not looking up. “What do you want?”