“Granny Vee’s house?”
The slope was steeper now. The going was hard work for Julia, harder still for her mother, but neither wanted to be the first to call for rest. If Mona was disturbed at how Julia, by interposing an answer to the rhetorical question, had spoiled the drama of the moment, it didn’t show. “Exactly, dear. At the Veazie townhouse on Edgecombe Avenue. Right there in my father’s study. Your grandfather was not only host but also referee. I was dating a man named Eddie in those days, and we were going out that night. We were in the foyer. We heard bits and pieces of the conversation. Adam said he was tired of endorsing a party that was so beholden to its Southern wing that its platform couldn’t give even a lukewarm endorsement of the Brown decision, and a party that ran the Congress but couldn’t pass a federal anti-lynching law. He said if that was the best the Democrats could do he’d try the Republicans. Adlai said if he got elected he could change all that, but Powell wouldn’t budge. I think it was plain to Stevenson that the meeting was just for show, that Powell never had any intention of negotiating. He was for Eisenhower all the way. That’s what I thought, anyway. Then my father caught us listening in the foyer. He got mad and slammed the door.” Mona smiled. “You’d never have been in that situation, would you, dear? Listening in the foyer? In Hanover, you always made sure your young man waited for you. You liked that, didn’t you? Leaving your young man alone downstairs until you were ready to make your entrance. And they waited. You had them eating out of your hand. You always liked that, didn’t you? Guys falling all over you? You were such a terrible flirt in those days. Never mind.”
Julia, boiling, kept her peace.
“That night, Eddie and I talked about it. He heard a little bit of the meeting, too. And we decided, the two of us, that Powell had another reason. It wasn’t just about the lynch law, or if the Dixiecrats had too much influence in the party. No. He was too passionate. Powell was no fool. He must have known Eisenhower had doubts about civil rights, and Stevenson didn’t. But Powell was determined not to endorse the Democrats that year, no matter what Stevenson offered him. And Eddie, well, he had a theory about why that might be. He said, ‘Maybe Powell doesn’t like who else is backing Stevenson.’ As simple as that.”
They had emerged from the tree line on a ridge overlooking farmland and clustered toy villages. Mona had reached her limit. Julia knew it at once. Her mother’s hands were trembling.
“We can stop for a rest if you want.”
But Mona was too deeply into her story to consider it. “So, anyway, I asked my mother. Granny Vee. This was a few days later. We were getting dressed, probably on our way to a Ladybugs thing. A wake, I think. We were wearing orange and white, because, well, when a Sister Lady dies, you dress for her wake in Ladybugs colors. All right, you know that already. I forget sometimes. Never mind. I asked her. Amaretta. She gave me this look, Julia. I know, when you were little, you used to say I had these looks I’d give you, like you were just the lowest of the low. My how-could-you-let-me-down-this-way look. I remember. Well, I used to tell you, I got it from Amaretta. Only her looks were worse. She looked at me like just by asking the question I had betrayed the Clan. And you know what she said to me, dear? She said, ‘We had to give it a shot, dear.’ That’s what she said. That’s all she said. And, yes, I know, maybe she was just talking about the meeting. Trying to make peace in the Democratic Party. But that wasn’t the impression I got. I got the impression that she was talking about something bigger. And for Amaretta, only one thing was big enough to qualify for that kind of—of worshipful abstraction. Not God. Not America. Not Harlem, or the darker nation. The Clan. Only the Clan. There wasn’t any other ‘we’ for Amaretta. I got the idea that what she was trying to say was that the Clan had gambled and lost. That the Clan had made some kind of big bet on Adlai Stevenson, and Adam Clayton Powell had spoiled it.”
Julia shook her head. “Then I don’t see what the big deal is. The Clan supported Stevenson. He lost. So what?”
“I don’t think the Empyreals are dying at all, dear. I think they’re doing just fine. Secretive as ever, but going strong.”
“You’re saying that all of this about how they’re old and unimportant—it’s some kind of cover story?”
“I just think they’re up to something. They were always up to something.”
“Something like what?”
They had started back down the slope. Mona took short, almost mincing steps, and now Julia had to work hard not to drift on ahead. “I’m an old woman, Julia Anne, and you shouldn’t take me too seriously. But Aurelia’s information was wrong. Your grandfather wasn’t the Bubba. Or he wasn’t just the Bubba. Later, he became the Grand Paramount. He ran the thing for ten years, before Bay Dennison. And it’s all supposed to be a big secret, but Preston had no secrets from your grandmother. And let me tell you what Granny Vee told me, years later. They’ve always been obsessed with the Presidency. The Empyreals.”
“You mean, wanting to influence him?”
“No, dear. I mean, wanting to pick one.” The forest thinned around them. Mona was near the end of her resources, and of her story. “About that night in ’56. Granny Vee told me the Empyreals ran Stevenson. That’s the way Amaretta put it, that they ran him. He was their man. They didn’t just support him. They had some kind of influence over him. And again in ’72. Not McGovern. One of the other Democrats. But something happened and he didn’t get the nomination. You see, Julia, your grandfather had this idea that the only way to get anything from the Caucasians was to use their own tools against them. They would never do the right thing out of conscience, he said. They would only do it out of self-interest. We had to own a candidate, he told your grandmother. The same way the powerful Caucasians did. We needed a man who would do our bidding not because his conscience bothered him but because circumstances left him no choice.”
“Blackmail,” Julia breathed. “You’re talking about blackmail.”
“I don’t know that for sure, Julia Anne. It’s possible. All I know is, the Empyreals developed this idea that what they needed was to own powerful Caucasians, to put them into positions where they would have no choice but to help our people. That was Grandpa Vee’s idea. At least I think it was.”
“Are you saying the Empyreals owned Adlai Stevenson?”
A long moment’s hesitation, Mona’s aged eyes gazing into the mirror of her youth. “Adlai was a good man. A decent man. A man of integrity. I don’t think it was possible to own him.” Focusing on her daughter again. “No, dear. I’d be very surprised if the Empyreals owned him. But it’s possible they thought they did.” A sad chuckle. “Those connections go way, way back, dear. The old families. Ours. Theirs. Black and white. Decades. More. It didn’t all have to be coercion. Some of it was more…mutual self-interest.”
Julia perked up. “Are you talking about passing? That some of the old white families are really old black families?” She could scarcely take it in. “Is that what you mean?”
Mona shook her head. “Oh, no, no, dear. Not at all. Oh, it could be. It’s possible. Back then, conditions were just so terrible. If you had the chance to flee from the darker nation and join the whiter world—yes, it could be. But that isn’t my point. I’m just saying that there could be commonalities of interest. Old white families and old black ones might wind up working together. Don’t assume it’s the Empyreals alone.” That laugh again, like a nervous spectator at a tragedy. “I’m an old woman, Julia, and an old fool. You shouldn’t take me too seriously. The mind plays tricks at my age.” Wobbly on her feet now. “I’m tired, Julia. I have to get back and get to bed.”
“We’re almost at the car.”
“I don’t want to talk any more.”
“Please. Just one more thing.”
“Take your hand off me, Julia Anne.”
“I’m sorry. Sorry.” She had not realized that she was holding her mother’s arm—gripping it, really, tightly, in anger, the way she used to squeeze Kellen’s when he loo
ked at her the wrong way, or didn’t. “Mona, please. Just tell me. You’re saying Empyreals used to gather information on powerful people, and they’d use it to—to improve the condition of the community? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what Amaretta told me.” Mona shook her head. “I don’t think anybody really knows.”
“But it has to be true, Mona. Byron Dennison was in the Landing a week and a half after Gina Joule was killed, pretty much giving the orders. Why else would he be there?”
“I was a married woman by then, dear. Living in New Hampshire. I wouldn’t have any idea.”
“Come on, Mona. You used to date him. Are you saying he never mentioned some kind of plan?”
The smile was once more dismissive and grandmotherly. “If Bay Dennison was the kind of secret manipulator you seem to think, dear, why would he let himself be seen? It’s all very strange.”
They were at the car. Mona asked her daughter to take the wheel, and Julia, who never drove a stick shift except when she visited her mother, agreed. The car jerked and shuddered all the way back to the house. Mona never complained. Her eyes were tightly shut, and if she was not actually asleep, she was happy to pretend to be.
(III)
JULIA WOULD NEVER KNOW FOR SURE. Lying abed that night, searching for a comfortable position on the ancient, sagging mattress, Julia marveled at how much of the life of the darker nation took place behind a veil of ignorance. Of the existence of the old families, with their money and education and tradition, most black Americans and nearly all white ones knew nothing. Of the secrets of their exclusive fraternities and sororities, outsiders knew far less than they thought they did. Of the Empyreals, most exclusive of all, nobody knew a thing. It all swirled through her mind. The Grand Paramount. Adlai Stevenson. Bubba. Kellen Zant, promising to blow the lid off the election, then being shot. She dozed, half woke, half dreamed, shuffling the events of the past three months.
And then she saw it.
Not all of it. There would be plenty of loose ends to tie up. But, lying there in the overheated guest room on the first floor of her mother’s crumbling manse in Plaisance-du-Touch, Julia Veazie Carlyle saw the shape of the Empyreals’ plan, and understood at last what Kellen had thought he knew. The only question was whether he was right.
She slept poorly, and dreamed of snow.
(IV)
LEAVING MONA IN THE MORNING was more difficult than Julia had expected, not because mother showed remorse but because daughter was shot through with it. Mona offered no assistance in apologizing. She behaved as though yesterday’s argument had never taken place. Over breakfast, Hap hovering as usual, Julia suddenly saw her mother as both more and less than she had always imagined. Mona was old, she was weakening, she was dispirited. Hap took care of her, and Mona, whatever her liveliness in youth, was of an age when being cared for was all she really wanted.
And what was so terrible about that?
“I’m sorry, Mona,” she said, hoping not to sound wooden.
“For what, dear?”
“For the way I…talked to you yesterday. I’m sorry.”
“Hormones,” her mother said, as she used to when Julia was a teen and they were at each other’s throats. Only Mona laughed.
Over the meal, Hap played referee, careful to ensure the conversation turned to nothing that might further upset his beloved. Afterward, Mona pronounced herself exhausted. “I’m still glad you came, dear.”
“So am I.”
Julia walked beside her mother along the short hall with its cracked parquet. The door to the master suite needed paint. She wished, idly, for the winning lottery ticket, so that she could care for Mona as she deserved. Then the empiricist took charge, reminding her that wishes were not horses, and most people in the world lived a good deal worse than this.
Mona took her daughter’s hands, pressed strengthlessly, smiled. She said, “You shouldn’t listen to me, dear. At my age there is a certain tendency to ramble. And to know everything.”
“I thought seventy was the new fifty.”
“Is it? Because just now it feels like the old ninety.”
“I love you, Mom,” Julia blurted.
Mona looked vaguely pleased, the way we are when we hear that a distant relative has remarried. “I love you also,” she said, the hazel eyes still far away. “Now, listen to me, dear. I have no idea what’s going on in…America. I don’t understand the country. I don’t know if I ever did. But I do know this much. It’s not a good place for our people. Negroes. The darker nation. African Americans. Not a good place. Never was and never will be.” She held up a hand to forestall her daughter’s objection. “You’re part of the Clan, dear. It feels to you like a kind of freedom. But it’s like that mirror over there.” She pointed. “The people in the mirror aren’t free at all, are they? They just do what the people on this side of the mirror let them do. We move, and they move the same way. We talk, they talk. We stop, they stop.”
“I think Lewis Carroll wrote that already.”
“Listen to me, dear. What Granny Vee told me, about the Empyreals? About their grand design? You’re right. She wasn’t herself. I have no idea how much was fact and how much was fancy. Fantasy, even. But, Julia dear, if it’s true? If the Empyreals aren’t dying? If they’re hiding in the shadows somewhere in the mirror where you can’t see, plot-ting and plotting, trying to make the Caucasians do what’s right?” An exhausted shrug. “I’m just wondering, dear: who’s to say they’re wrong?”
Abruptly, she released her daughter’s hand and, closing the door behind her, retreated once more into her chosen exile.
(V)
UNSATISFIED but knowing she was doomed to remain so, Julia finally departed, Hap returning her to Toulouse and the station as she puzzled pointlessly over his true relationship to Mona. At the barrier, he hugged her clumsily and handed her a shopping bag, the forgotten Christmas gifts for the children, wrapped beautifully. Julia asked him to thank Mona, but suspected he had bought them himself, and recently. The train left fifteen minutes late: for France, a national disaster. The ride was six hours, and once more she slept most of the way, swatting away the efforts at conversation from a friendly young American couple who sat across from her and resembled closely the lovers she and Mona had twice passed on the path in Montech. In Paris, she stayed at the same hotel, and suddenly the clerk behind the counter and the man reading the newspaper in the lobby and the smiling elevator operator seemed part of a single vast conspiracy. The boy who brought her breakfast kept eyeing her sideways as she stood in her robe waiting for him to finish, and she wondered whether it was her legs that drew his admiration, or if somebody owned him.
Leaving the country turned out to be harder even than leaving Mona. She saw the officer’s eyes widen when he ran her passport beneath the scanner. A guard led her to a small room off the main floor, where two uniformed women went through her luggage, under the watchful eyes of two men in business suits, one of them from the American embassy, who said he was there to safeguard her rights but kept his eyes on the table. The women went through her cosmetics and dirty underclothes. They even unwrapped the tardy Christmas presents, which turned out to be unimaginative touristy gimcracks. The only thing they did not search was her person—they seemed willing, but the man from the embassy forestalled them—and that was a good thing, because it was on her person that Julia had hidden the contents of the long manila envelope she had found squeezed into the shopping bag among the gifts.
Finally they allowed her, with Gallic reluctance, to depart. The man from the embassy apologized, and snapped at them in French, but Julia remembered that the American ambassador was one of the President’s most trusted cronies. As if in recompense, the airline bumped her to first class. She dozed for an hour, restraining her natural tendency to rush, because they could still be watching. Then she took herself off to the restroom, where she withdrew from their hiding place the three pages from the envelope. She read through the legal document
for perhaps the fifth time since last night. Back in her seat, she returned the pages to their envelope and slid the envelope into her carry-on. She rang the flight attendant, and they discussed what wines were on board: this being Air France, there was a nice selection. She drank two glasses before her hands stopped shaking.
The document was a confession to the accidental killing of Gina Joule on or about February 14, 1973. It was signed by Lemaster’s third roommate in Hilliman Suite, the late Jonathan “Jock” Hilliman.
CHAPTER 53
ARRIVAL
(I)
BUT LEMASTER DID NOT BELIEVE a word of it. After all these years, she could distinguish the cool sobriety of admiring surprise from the gentle rationality of cautious skepticism. He had met her outside security, smiled and waved, and handed her a flower Jeannie had made in school that told her how much she was loved. Now, in the car, she had told him bits and pieces of the tale, wondering at last how far she could trust him; and how far he trusted her back.
“Those men are friends of mine,” he said gently when his wife was done. “I want to make that clear. Well, you know already, but I want to emphasize it. I might be biased, but I’ve known all three of them for more than thirty years. Well, less for Jock, seeing as how he’s no longer with us.”
Julia looked at him as the Mercedes purred through the night. Mile-posts clicked past on the Hutchinson River Parkway, small and shining green in the headlights, sharply etched against the trees and endless white beyond. She had called him before boarding the flight, asking him to cancel the limousine and meet her at the airport. She asked him to come alone—that is, without Mr. Flew. She did not want to say why over the telephone, and, for a blessing, Lemaster did not inquire. But she knew the time had come, as Granny Vee used to say, to make a clean breast.
Or moderately clean. She had told her husband about being searched, and knew from his reaction that the American observer would soon be transferred to a post in some mosquito-infested back-water. She had told him about the confession but had omitted, for the moment, the Empyreals, on the theory that he would refuse to talk about it.
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