For a moment the pain rose, the realization that he could never see Junie again. But he wrestled it down, as he had every day for the past couple of months, and he supposed he might have to wrestle it down every day for the next thirty years.
Never mind. Junie was past. It was as simple as that. Junie was past, and Aurie was future. He had to live in the future.
He stood at the bottom of the sweeping staircase. “Are you almost ready?” he called.
“One minute, honey.”
“You said that half an hour ago.”
“Get used to it, buster.”
He checked his watch. “We’ll miss the plane.”
“There’s another one at nine-thirty.”
“We’ll miss our connection. We’ll have to spend the night in New York.”
“Then leave me alone and let me dress.”
Eddie smiled. He took an apple from the fruit bowl on the dining-room table, then settled onto the bench seat in the foyer with a copy of Toni Morrison’s latest novel.
The doorbell rang. Eddie put the book down, supposing that a late gift was being delivered.
He was wrong.
George Collier stood on the front step.
“Let’s walk,” the killer said.
(II)
“WE HAVE A PROBLEM, Mr. Wesley.”
“We do?”
Collier nodded. He was wearing a windbreaker and jeans. The jacket was zipped but loose and bulky. Eddie wondered what it concealed. “I’ve decided to retire from my current line of work. Time to turn it over to the youngsters.”
They had reached the suspension bridge. Collier stood aside, indicating with a sweep of the hand that Eddie should precede him. As they traded places, Collier glanced up at the house. Eddie had no need to do the same. He had told Aurelia only that he would be right back. He knew she would be watching from the window.
“The trouble is,” Collier resumed, “that a man who does what I do doesn’t generally leave witnesses around. People who can get him into trouble.”
“I can see how that would be a problem,” said Eddie, hoping the blond man’s attention might slacken for a moment, giving Eddie a ghost of a chance to shove him over the fence, down the two-hundred-foot drop into the gorge.
“You could get me into serious trouble, Mr. Wesley.” He pointed over his shoulder. “So could your wife. If she has any sense, she’s hunting for her gun right now.”
“She has a lot of sense.”
“No doubt. However, I have her gun.” He patted one of the many bulges in the jacket.
“I see,” said Eddie, waiting. They were standing in the middle of the bridge, leaning on the rail, the surface rocking slowly in the wind.
“You’re thinking I’m here to kill you.”
“The notion crossed my mind.”
“That would be silly of me, killing you in Ithaca. If I wanted you dead, Mr. Wesley, I’d wait for you and your lovely wife on Eleuthera. Honeymooners drown all the time.” Collier patted Eddie’s shoulder. “No. I’m here to offer you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“I told you the people I was working for insisted that I keep you alive. Now I guess I know why. They didn’t dare harm a hair on your head, did they? Because she would do something about it. Expose their secrets. Their connection to Agony.”
Eddie rounded on him then, furious and fearful. “You—you didn’t—”
“But I did, Mr. Wesley. It’s your own fault. You left plenty of clues. I’ve been to Norwich. Don’t give me that look. You sister remains”—he seemed to search for the word—“undisturbed.” A pause. “For the moment.”
“What do you want, Collier?”
“A simple exchange. You leave me alone, I leave you alone.”
“And Junie?”
“You mean Gwen. I leave her alone. I’m going into retirement, like I said. I have a farm, and I’m staying there. I’m even getting married. Oh, and, by the way, congratulations.” That yellow grin. “You do see the point, don’t you, Mr. Wesley? If the FBI drops in on me one day, if one of my former clients sends a hit squad after me, well, I’ll know who sent them. I can find you. I can find your wife. I can find your sister. Follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then I wish you a pleasant honeymoon.” The killer stuck out his hand. Eddie did not shake. Collier shrugged. “You’re probably right. We’re not friends. We’re not anything, really.” He adjusted his jacket. “Well, all right. We won’t meet again, Mr. Wesley. One last job, and then I’m through.”
Eddie’s eyes narrowed. “One last job?”
Collier nodded. “You don’t want to know.”
“True. I don’t.”
But he was remembering what Collier had said to him after killing Benjamin Mellor: Do you think because I’m a hired gun I don’t care about my country? And his words to Aurelia, at Lanning Frost’s apartment years ago: There certainly exist people, Mrs. Garland, who are not worth protecting.
“If and when it happens—” Collier began, and stopped.
Eddie took his cue. “I won’t say a word.”
“That is correct, Mr. Wesley. You won’t. Because you know what happens if you do.” He straightened up. He said, without turning, “It’s all right, Mrs. Wesley. You can put down the knife.”
“My last name,” said Aurelia, “is Treene.” But she lowered her hand.
“All the way down, please.”
At a nod from her husband, she let the knife clatter to the concrete surface. Never looking back, Collier gave the knife a kick. It bounced, then spun, then slid beneath the fence, tumbling toward the creek below. Eddie watched it glisten bravely, then vanish suddenly, like the hopes of youth.
“Do we have a deal?” said Collier.
“Yes,” said Eddie, arms now around his wife.
“Yes,” said Aurelia.
“Good.”
Eddie met the killer’s pale eyes. America was so violent a country. Assassinations had become almost commonplace. People expected them. The television networks loved them, because everybody tuned in. Horror and disaster were the nation’s most popular spectator sports. Perhaps that was the true American Angle. People watched, and cried, and hugged the familiar ever closer. Wesley Senior would have called it holding tight to that which is good. Eddie found himself drawing his wife into his protective embrace. Lanning Frost, to whom next year’s election had been all but conceded, was a terrible man who had done terrible things. His march to the Oval Office was fueled by violence. Yet he, too, had a family that loved him. More than that, there was a way to stop such men. Indictments. Impeachments. Trials. The country, in an agony of righteousness, had turned one President out of office, without resorting to murder. Might there not be energy to do it a second time?
Maybe. Maybe not.
“What you’re planning,” said Aurelia suddenly, “is wrong.” So she had been thinking along the same lines.
Once more the killer bared his teeth. “Wrong. I like the sound of that word. Short and to the point. I wonder what it means.” He shrugged. “Tell you what, Mrs. Wesley. The day America looks up the definition, and cares? I will, too.”
He turned and, for the last time, left them.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS NOVEL, although spanning twenty years, is about the sixties. I mark the sixties as two decades, not one, the era beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and ending with President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Brown, like the Cold War and the Apollo Program, was a product of the nation’s buoyant postwar optimism. Nixon’s fall from power reflected the nation’s newfound pessimism. The Vietnam War formed the bridge between the two. Like so many wars, Vietnam began in idealism and certainty, but ended in cynicism and doubt. Vietnam was probably the greatest foreign-policy calamity in American history, and we have not recovered from its domestic effects. The end of the war in 1975 marked the beginning of the end of rule by the World War II generation
, and the dawn of modern America—the mean-spirited America of me-first, trust-nobody, sound bites, revile-anyone-who-disagrees, and devil-take-the-hindmost. All of this misbehavior is a mark of our timidity, not our confidence. Americans across the political spectrum cannot bear dissent, because we lack the courage to meet it squarely.
And yet, within that collapse of American self-belief, individual stories of triumph are possible. I have tried to manufacture one here, without slighting the truth. In particular, I have worked hard not to exaggerate the violence of the sixties. With the exception of the crimes that I specifically attribute to Agony, all the attacks that I describe actually took place; and I have listed only a fraction. In our rosy memories of the era we might readily forget how much terror really occurred, with true believers on the left and right sharing responsibility.
I have not, however, been entirely true to the record. The opening chapters of this novel rest on a slight anachronism. The Harlem society in which Eddie Wesley moves was more characteristic of the 1940s than the 1950s, and of the 1950s than the 1960s. By the time Eddie Wesley began to come to prominence as a writer, the trickle of middle-class families out of Sugar Hill and into midtown Manhattan and the suburbs had become a flood. Some matrons tried to maintain the whirl of the grand salons, but by the early 1960s, even most of the artists and writers had moved out, although Langston Hughes himself stayed on in Harlem until his death. Indeed, even the world of the forties and fifties was less intellectually fierce than had been the salons of the Harlem Renaissance, notably that of the millionaire A’Lelia Walker, the only child of Madame C. J. Walker. A’Lelia’s was surely the greatest of the salons, and one can date the end of the Harlem Renaissance from her death in the summer of 1931. After that, the tradition continued, albeit soon concerned less with the intellect and more with social position. And, as I say, by the sixties, it was practically over. But I needed that strange and wonderful and terrifying social world to last a little longer in order to create a plausible spread of ages for the novel’s protagonists, and so I chose to fiddle a bit with history. My only excuse, other than the needs of the narrative, is that I have tried to reorder the decades in a way that does honor to my subject, for, whatever the weaknesses and contradictions of Harlem society in the middle years of the twentieth century, it possessed the singular virtue of so many efforts at solidarity: They tried. At least they tried.
I have shoved around a number of specific historical events to fit the needs of the narrative. For example, the security hearing for Robert Oppenheimer occurred in April and May of 1954, not March and April of 1955, but I needed it to fall around the time of Aurelia’s wedding to Kevin Garland. Future Director of Central Intelligence William Colby began his second tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968—not in 1967, as in my story—but that would have been too late for Eddie to meet him. The program that became known as PHOENIX did not get that name until after Eddie’s departure from Vietnam. The Soviet agent who masqueraded as Emil Goldfus has gone down in history as Rudolf Abel, but that was not his real name either. I moved the FBI’s arrest of Goldfus to May of 1957 because Eddie had other things to do in June, when the arrest actually took place.
Allen Dulles’s efforts to persuade President Kennedy to recommend an American version of the Official Secrets Act came in the spring of 1961, not the winter of 1962. Virginia Slims cigarettes were not introduced until 1968, but I could not envision Aurelia smoking any other brand. Similarly, the Subaru was not sold in the United States until two years after little Mindy drives one, but the car just seemed so right for her. Aurelia’s theory about dwarf birches is wrong.
Eddie could not have worked in the office of speechwriting at the White House during the Kennedy Administration, because the office did not exist until the Nixon Administration. But it seemed an appropriate job for him, so I cheated. Langston Hughes’s effort to deny William Faulkner the Gold Medal for Literature occurred in the early 1960s, not the late 1950s. Lloyd Garrison’s offices did not move to Park Avenue until the 1960s. At the time Eddie met him in the 1950s, he would have been closer to Wall Street. But I wanted to avoid too great a profusion of Wall Street lawyers. The references to Foucault in chapter 21 are moderately anachronistic, but they were utterly irresistible. At the time of Eddie Wesley’s meeting with Agent Stilwell in 1969, the federal women’s penitentiary in Tallahassee had not yet been constructed. I moved the seizure of the administration building at Harvard ahead a few days to make it coincide with Aurelia’s visit to the White House the morning after Eisenhower’s funeral. I moved President Ford’s pardon of his predecessor forward by a few weeks. I made certain minor alterations in the geography of Ithaca, New York, and its environs (including Cornell University) to smooth Aurelia’s life a bit. The alert reader will no doubt discover additional examples where the story diverges from sober history. I hope that most of those you might spot represent my decisions, not my mistakes.
On the other hand, many historical instances that might seem to the reader to be my inventions actually occurred. For example, the story of the Lumbee Indians and their shootout with the Klan at Maxton is true. The summer 1959 meeting at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, intended to persuade various movers and shakers that the young Senator could win, actually took place. Richard Nixon really did negotiate with Martin Luther King, and try to persuade the Republican Party to pass a voting-rights act in the late 1950s as a way to break up the New Deal Coalition. But Eisenhower would not go along. In addition, Nixon really did sneak out of the White House in May of 1970 to talk to the antiwar protesters, and, afterward, went to the Capitol to reminisce in the House chamber and, subsequently, stopped at the Mayflower for breakfast. And although, for dramatic reasons, I have moved the events from daylight to nighttime, Nixon, by most accounts, really did cry after Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned, and really did stroll by the swimming pool in a mood that made aides fear he might try to take his own life.
The basic theme of Eddie Wesley’s short story “Evening Prayer” is drawn from a favorite tale of the great raconteur, great lawyer, and great human being Thurgood Marshall. Adam Clayton Powell’s advice about carrying the heavy end of the log was actually delivered toward the end of his colorful life. I had hoped to find space for the fascinating Powell in this novel; but that story will have to wait. A handful of lines in the novel, as well as the characters of Irene and Patrick Martindale, are intended as an homage to the great John le Carré. Those who admire his work as much as I do will understand why.
The Harlem apartment building where Eddie Wesley lived, at 435 Convent Avenue, was once among the most prestigious addresses in all of Harlem, rivaling the fabled 409 Edgecombe Avenue (home, in my story, to Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Garland). Among the many well-known residents of 435 Convent Avenue was Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., one branch of whose family remained there across generations.
Readers of my novel The Emperor of Ocean Park may notice certain minor alterations in the structure of the Garland family. But I did not know the Garlands as well then as I do now. Similarly, the lives of Mona Veazie and her children are not precisely as Julia recalls them years later in my novel New England White. But time plays tricks on us all.
Many people have made contributions to this novel, particularly by sharing their memories of the Harlem of the 1950s. I would like to single out in particular the reminiscences of my father, Lisle Carter, and of Mrs. Constance Wright. I was greatly assisted by the staff of the Morris-Jumel House on Jumel Terrace in Harlem, a splendid museum I highly recommend. The many alterations I have made in the interior geography of the mansion are my sole responsibility. (By the way, the staff denies that the house is haunted.) I relied for my research on sources too numerous to mention. I hope that I have correctly absorbed their teaching. My marvelous editor, Phyllis Grann, and my outstanding literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, once more managed to rein in my flights of fancy without interfering with the integrity of the work.
Finally, I would like to thank my children, Leah and Andrew, w
ho continue to inspire me, even as I slowly grow accustomed to the fact that they are no longer upstairs slumbering as I write; and my wife of twenty-six years, Enola Aird, my first and best reader, my partner and cheerleader, and, truly, God’s gift in my life.
Cheshire, Connecticut
December 2007
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of the New York Times best sellers The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White as well as seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion and Civility: Manners, Moral, and the Etiquette of Democracy. He and his family live near New Haven, Connecticut.
ALSO BY STEPHEN L. CARTER
FICTION
The Emperor of Ocean Park
New England White
NONFICTION
God’s Name in Vain:
The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics
The Dissent of the Governed:
A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty
Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy
Integrity
The Confirmation Mess:
Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process
The Culture of Disbelief:
How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen L. Carter
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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