Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “But—”

  She stopped, not sure how to make the point. Yes, sure, she and Kellen had now and then exchanged little trinkets and treats: that birthday fudge, for instance. But Julia could not get her mind around the idea that he would have bought her an eighteen-hundred-dollar mirror. She was a married woman! Who was she supposed to tell her husband it was from? She would never have accepted it, as Kellen would surely have realized, and, besides—

  “But he didn’t give it to me.”

  “Well, no,” Frank Carrington admitted, rubbing ghostly hands over each other to wash away responsibility. “Sorry about that. It’s just that he said he would call me with delivery instructions. Only he never did.”

  “You mean—”

  “It’s still here. Would you care to see it?”

  (III)

  AND SO JULIA, hoping it would all turn out to be a dream, had the chance to examine the second mirror Kellen had left her. “Now, Julia, you understand, I can’t give it to you,” said Frank, removing the dust-cloth. “It was my impression that he intended it as a gift for you, but I don’t know for sure. So the mirror would still be his property. The property of his estate, I guess.”

  “I understand,” said Julia, circling the tall oval mirror, noting chips and scratches automatically. It was in poor condition, but something in her loved it for its age. Ever since childhood, Julia had harbored a secret theory about what made old mirrors different from other antiques: if you stared into one long enough, you would begin to see faint outlines of all the women down through the decades who had preened and primped in front of it. Back in Hanover, and even more so at Granny Vee’s townhouse in Harlem, the younger Julia used to stand for hours, squinting at the silvered glass, waiting for history to reflect back at her. So far, despite years of staring, no luck, but now and then she imagined Mona behind her, warning in that high voice, self-pitying and self-satisfied, that Julia should stop hunting so hard for whatever she imagined waited on the other side: If you stare at those things too long, her mother would say, supposedly quoting Granny Vee, you’ll turn into one of them.

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” Frank murmured, as if giving her a sales pitch. His voice had crept higher, as it did when he was nervous. She noticed that his hands had resumed their shiver, and wondered why. Maybe he planned to keep the mirror and sell it again.

  “A beauty,” she lied in agreement. Actually, it was poorly cared for. She tilted the mirror and felt it weave. The glass had been polished, but her reflection was distended in the unsteady surface, like a fun-house image. The more Julia examined it, the more the cheval reminded her of something, but she could not think just what. “One of the finials is broken,” she said.

  “Chipped.”

  “That’s a big chip.” Frank spread his hands, perhaps to indicate that the damage was out of them. Julia studied the joints and the swivels, picked at a scab of glue. “And Kellen paid full price?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “After you told him I’d looked at it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Julia shook her head, completely confused. She did not see why Kellen would buy her an ugly, overpriced antique mirror in such poor condition. But, counting the Comyns Seth had delivered in Arkadelphia, this made two mirrors from Kellen in a week. Even a man as impulsive as Kellen Zant would have a reason for so strange a pair of gifts. Was this what Boris Gibbs had heard about? That Kellen was in the Landing buying her an expensive antique? But why would anyone be angry about it? Could this be the surplus Mary Mallard had asked about, the one Kellen had told her he would be giving Julia? She touched the broken finial again. If she knew Kellen—and she did—he had been up to no good. But the connection between buying the cheval and doing no good eluded her.

  She warned herself to stop wondering. What Kellen might have been up to was not her business. He had tried time and again to draw her back into his life while he was alive. She would not permit him to succeed now that he was dead. For the first time since Kellen’s death, Julia’s anger at him began to dull her pain.

  “And that was all he said? That it was a gift for me?”

  “Well, not all.” Frank had retreated so far into the gloom that his voice seemed to float on air. “He said you would like it because you love history.”

  But history bored her. She must have told Kellen a thousand times that she cared about the future not the past, a sin for which Mona frequently admonished her. She was about to say so, perhaps unwisely, when a tinkling crash sounded from the front of the shop.

  Jeannie was on her feet, eyes innocently wide, hands safely behind her back, several graceful steps from the shattered porcelain building.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said.

  CHAPTER 9

  SURFACE TENSION

  (I)

  LEMASTER’S SECOND COUSIN ASTRID was in town for Thanksgiving, her pair of serious, distant, gangly youngsters in tow, and she brought as usual a mad, gaunt, chain-smoking energy to the house on Hunter’s Meadow. Astrid Venable was dark and tiny and handsome, like Lemaster himself, and every bit as haughty and brilliant. They had both immigrated as teens, and had been raised—along with Astrid’s younger brother, Harrison, star investment banker—by the same hard-driving aunt in Chicago. Their aunt sent them to Catholic school, trying to cover two bases at once. Astrid focused, laserlike, on whatever drew her interest, mostly her work on Capitol Hill, and her social vortex, for the club life of the darker nation was her second home, and sometimes her first: she had served as national vice-president of Ladybugs, and was currently national secretary for one of the more exclusive black sororities, and would never skip either a convention or an opportunity to tell you why you should have been there. Astrid thought of nobody but herself. She grew irritated if Lemaster did not answer her e-mails immediately upon receipt, and often called Hunter’s Heights late at night, knowing Julia was always awake, to tell her to turn on the television, quick, because Public Broadcasting had a documentary about some obscure black sculptor of whom Julia had never heard, and never would again. If Julia said she was doing something else, Astrid became defensive, and annoyed.

  As for Astrid’s children, they were slobs as well as snobs, leaving clothes and boots and electronic games and Coke bottles and cookie crumbs distributed around Hunter’s Heights in a pattern that suggested propriety, or at least the existence of a servant class, as in their raising there always had been. Before the move to Washington, Astrid had been a partner in a Wall Street law firm, and had more cash stashed away than her cousin, by no means starving, would earn in five years. Lemaster resolutely avoided discussing politics, but, apart from her clubs, Astrid talked of nothing else, and hated every word out of your mouth unless it parroted every word out of hers. There were husbands in Astrid’s past, not all of them her own, and perhaps in her future too. Lemaster considered his cousin a screechy, unthinking loudmouth, and a spoiling mother besides. The children, he told his wife, were scarcely recognizable as West Indian, for he possessed the immigrant’s combative pride in his heritage, whether it really existed or not.

  Julia was secretly scared of her.

  Astrid flew in on Wednesday, to kisses and hugs and exchanges of sacks full of Christmas presents, and Julia prepared a tofu-based stir-fry to complement the Thanksgiving turkey, because no one in Astrid’s family ate meat or poultry, or not when their mother was around. The children, said Astrid, had brought their homework, although, from what Julia could tell, their tasks consisted mostly of playing hand-held video games, and adjusting their laptops to the household’s wireless router, so that they could instant-message their friends.

  Thanksgiving dinner itself managed to be boisterous and desultory at once—boisterous because of Astrid’s constant yapping, and because the table was full, including Wendy Tollefson, Julia’s buddy from her teaching days, as well as several friends from the university who had nobody else to dine with; desultory because neither Carlyle son attended. Aaron had received permission to sp
end Thanksgiving in Texas with the family of his wealthy roommate, and Preston, mysterious as always in his rudeness, had simply announced, by e-mail and without explanation, that he would not be present. At Julia’s urging, Lemaster asked Suzanne de Broglie, a professor at the div school, to bless the food. Suzanne prayed to “God, our Mother” as her president glared at his wife. After dessert, by family tradition, everyone at the table gave thanks for something. Jeannie thanked God for her wonderful Mommy and Daddy and her wonderful sister and both of her wonderful brothers and for everybody else who was alive, and also the ones who were dead. Vanessa’s prayer was inaudible. When Astrid’s turn came, she gave thanks for the defeat of the latest attempt to destroy the public schools by providing vouchers to poor children, and added her fervent hope that God would soon expose the Religious Right as the Irreligious Wrong.

  Suzanne’s father, also a divinity professor, had been a stern traditionalist and was one of Lemaster’s great heroes. After dinner it was plain that Lemmie was tempted to ask her what Eduard de Broglie would have thought of her prayer. A few years ago perhaps he would have. But he was president of the university now, and so settled for venting, later, at his wife. The problem, he told Julia as they readied for bed, was that people want a God small enough to fit in their hip pockets, to be pulled out only when necessary to gain a secular advantage. Nobody wants a God who tells us what to do, he said. We want a God who commands only what we tell Him to command, and allows whatever we tell Him to allow. We want a God who’s smaller than we are, who is never unruly, who falls into line. No wonder nobody goes to church any more. Why worship a Being that insignificant? Julia, like everyone in the family, had heard the speech a hundred times. She agreed because agreement was what Lemaster liked. Lying beside him, she tried to imagine a husband with a sense of humor.

  On Friday night, Julia wanted to drag her cousin-in-law, as the children called her, to the monthly meeting of Ladybugs, because Astrid, despite her move to Washington, remained a member of the fabled Westchester County chapter, before which the others all but bowed down, in obsequity as well as simple envy. Westchester sopped up a considerable fraction of the black wealth of greater New York, and its members included one president of a Fortune 500 company, two wives of heads of Fortune 100 companies, two major network-television personalities, four wives of New York sports stars who earned millions, on and on, down to those who, like Astrid, were merely (as Granny Vee used to say) decently off.

  To Julia’s surprise, Astrid pronounced herself too exhausted, so they stayed home and played three-handed pinochle with Vanessa, which in the great days of Harlem had been practically the official game of the Clan. They ate popcorn and watched an old movie and mostly waited for Lemaster, who had to drop in on a retirement dinner for the senior black lawyer in town; and Julia had the shrewd intuition that it was the desire to see her cousin, not so mortal a vice as tiredness, that had kept Astrid home.

  “Are the media out of your hair, dear?” she asked Julia at one point, startling her into playing the wrong card.

  “You mean, because of what happened to Kellen?” A nervous laugh. “That’s all ancient history, the way the news cycle works these days.”

  “I wonder if that’s true.”

  “If what’s true?”

  “If it’s ancient history.” She looked worried, and in need of a smoke, and Julia knew she would soon be excusing herself for a little walk in the yard. Astrid sensed the scrutiny. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s what I do for a living.”

  Julia, thinking of the cheval mirror, said nothing, but Vanessa, scribbling the scores, shot Aunt Astrid a worried glance, picking up a nuance her mother had missed. “Is the Senator worried about what Kellen was working on?”

  The Senator being Astrid’s boss.

  “No, no, darling, don’t be silly. No. Why would you say such a thing?” And excused herself to take that walk without waiting for Vanessa’s answer. Julia, too, wondered why her daughter had asked, but before she could press, Vanessa escaped to her cell phone, because That Casey was calling her. Later on, Julia chatted with her cousin-in-law in the basement guest room, decorated with posters of Broadway shows featuring black artists, and Astrid said what she always said, that she did not understand why Julia did not listen to the authentic music of the community: by which she meant the gruesomely misogynistic lyrics that were Lemaster’s secret love. Vanessa waltzed in, wanting to show Aunt Astrid the photograph Seth Zant had given them in Arkadelphia. Julia was mortified. She had thought it well hidden, but trying to conceal anything from Vanessa was a thankless task, as they had learned when, scarcely past toddler stage, she had uncovered the trove of Christmas presents Lemaster had buried in the back of the locked cabinet in his study.

  “They were this really hot item,” said Vanessa triumphantly.

  Astrid’s eyes widened. “They were?” Julia saw her future, this juicy item passed along the gossip chain, from one chapter of Ladybugs to the next. Astrid smiled at her. “Lemaster never told me.”

  “He, um, he’s good at keeping secrets,” said Julia, feeling the peculiar need to apologize.

  “I’ll say,” said Astrid, her tone disdainful, as though keeping secrets was another vice.

  (II)

  THE VISIT, despite the season, was no social call. This was business, and Astrid’s only business nowadays was politics. She served as chief of staff for Senator Malcolm Whisted, another longtime Lemaster friend. Their roots went back to college, when they had spent their final two years on campus as part of a foursome sharing Hilliman Suite, reserved by terms of a long-ago deed for the eldest member of the Hilliman clan then attending the college, and up to three of his friends. The suite occupied most of the top floor of Hilliman Hall, a dormitory, not to be confused with the social-science tower and half a dozen other campus buildings, the Hilliman family being among the university’s largest benefactors. The rest of the floor consisted of two smaller rooms, very desirable these days for their proximity to Hilliman Suite, even if they had once been servants’ quarters.

  Jock Hilliman, who went on to further fortune as a corporate raider, had the suite back in Lemaster’s day, and scandalized his relatives by inviting the black man to move in: the first time, whispered his relatives, that a Negro had ever crossed the threshold of Hilliman Suite, other than in service. He added two more of his buddies, known then as Scrunchy and Mal, who grew up to be, respectively, the President of the United States, and a senior Senator planning to enter the Democratic primaries that began in just three months with the Iowa caucuses, and, if things went as planned, to challenge Scrunchy next fall. The press was already fascinated by the possibility of college roommates running against each other. But the relationship was less close than it appeared. Jock, Scrunchy, and Mal had mostly lost touch with each other over the years, but Lemaster, with his eerily efficient power of friendship, had stayed close to all three. When Jock died three years ago—in the arms of his much younger mistress, although the obituaries said only that it was a heart attack while visiting a friend—Lemaster had eulogized him so masterfully that even Scrunchy and Mal, hard-nosed politicians, had managed a few tears for the cameras.

  It was Lemaster who had helped Astrid secure her job.

  (III)

  ASTRID SPENT MUCH OF SATURDAY afternoon closeted with her cousin in his study, their raised voices perfectly evident to anyone who, like Julia, snuck through the breezeway, stepped into the anteroom, and pressed her ear to the heavy door. Julia could not make out the words, but had discerned last night, from the small cues of posture and glance, that Astrid was for once the supplicant, and Lemaster held all the cards. She could not linger, and not only because she might get caught: she had to pick up the kids from the multiplex where, in various combinations, her children and Astrid’s were seeing movies. Driving over in the fully repaired Escalade, she tried to figure out what the argument could be about.

  Inside, she found Jeannie sitting primly on a benc
h with Odessa, Astrid’s thirteen-year-old, for they had seen the new Disney; and, striding up and down with a soda in one hand and his phone in the other, Odessa’s brother, Cedric, fifteen and unusually tall for a Carlyle, who, with his mother’s distracted permission, had snuck into an R-rated film involving vampires and world conquest, the plot consisting mostly of gore. They were all waiting for Vanessa, who had met That Casey to see a romantic comedy, and Julia disciplined herself not to wonder what the two of them were getting up to in the darkness. Theirs was the shortest film, but Casey had evidently been late, and the couple had gone to the next show.

  Thinking of nobody else.

  Burbling Jeannie had loved the Disney, sophisticated Odessa pretended to have found it beneath her, and tall Cedric was too busy on the phone to greet Aunt Julia. She checked the times, discovered that the romantic comedy would not be out for another hour and ten minutes, and suggested that they get some Chinese food at the place across the street, then come back for Vanessa. While everybody was busily agreeing, Julia spotted That Casey in the vestibule, very cozy with the sort of girl Vanessa liked to call “trivial blonde,” who displayed, even in the November chill, sufficient flesh to have risked, in Julia’s youth, arrest. Furious for Vanessa’s sake, ignoring every sensible rule of parental non-intervention, Julia stormed across the lobby, tapped the aspiring poet on the shoulder, and was nearly caught off guard, as always, by the pristine innocence of Casey Wyatt’s moist, sensitive green eyes.

  “Mrs. Carlyle! Hey, how are you holding up? Was it really terrible? Vanessa says it was really terrible.” Elbowing the trivial blonde as he fished for inside information. “This is Vanessa’s mom. She found that dead black guy.”

  The blonde mumbled what might have been a greeting.

  “So are you okay?” said Casey, less an expression of compassion than an effort to suggest his own status as insider with what was doubtless the Landing’s most talked-about family. Brown ringlets of hair curled boyishly over his forehead. The soft curls gave him a Byronic look, and it was his poetic side that drew Vanessa; that, plus the fact that he was her only suitor at the regional high school, where perhaps twenty kids out of fourteen hundred were black. “Vanessa says it was messy, his head all shot off and everything.”