Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “Eddie’s first novel won all these awards—” Gary began.

  “If I wanted your opinion,” said Erebeth, “I’d have borne you myself. But that ninny Stella had you instead, and your father was Father’s chauffeur, so I would suggest you keep your stupid ideas in your head.” To Eddie, sweetly: “What awards were those, dear?”

  Liveried servants cleared. Erebeth commanded the party to the library. The corridors were dark, depressing wood. The sconces were muted, because Erebeth’s eyes were sensitive to light. Tamra pushed the wheelchair. She was big and blond and forty and looked as if she should be riding horses. According to Gary, Erebeth hired a new minor domo every six months or so, but Tamra had lasted more than twice that, maybe because none of the others had ever fought back. Erebeth did as she pleased. She was the only living grandchild of Major Hilliman, founder of the family fortune. The Hilliman trusts expired on Erebeth’s death, and she was charged with rewriting them, so nobody denied her anything, including years of their lives.

  Tea and cakes were served.

  “I admire you people,” said Erebeth as they sat beneath long portraits of prominent ancestors. Two were royalty. One was a President. Everybody was sipping Darjeeling except Erebeth, who guzzled a foul-smelling elixir from a plain brown bottle. Gary whispered that it was supposed to keep her alive forever. Eddie suspected that her various hatreds would be enough to keep her batteries charged. “Negroes,” the old woman clarified. “I admire you Negroes. Only a hundred years out of slavery, and look how far you’ve come. Still on the bottom!” Erebeth cackled at her joke. Gary waggled a warning finger at his friend, but Eddie was stone. I keep my politics under wraps at Quonset Point, Gary had told him earlier. Easier for everyone that way.

  “Stop it,” said Tamra. She had a square jaw and a gaze of disconcerting directness. You had the sense that lies were beneath her.

  “I’m just having a little fun, dear,” Erebeth sulked.

  “Apologize,” said Tamra.

  “I shall do no such thing.” Then she brightened and, in her way, apologized after all. “Actually,” she said, touching Eddie’s hand again, “I like the Negroes. I do.” Shifting her gaze briefly toward the disapproving Tamra. “I write checks to the NAACP,” Erebeth added, mournfully, as if disclosing the family shame. “Gigantic checks. I’m their biggest donor in the country.”

  “In Rhode Island,” said Tamra. “And only the third biggest.”

  (II)

  THE TWO YOUNG MEN were walking on the beach, managing, rather nicely given their considerable inebriation, brandy and cigars. The ocean was inky dark and triumphant. Distant lights were boats, or buoys, or optical illusions. Erebeth owned the sand, a mile in both directions. She was said to own the legislature, too, which had granted her by statute the needed exemptions. Eddie wondered what it must have been like to grow up this way.

  “Aunt Erebeth wants me to run her foundation,” said Gary tipsily. “She’s a greedy old bitch, and she’d leave her money to herself if she could, but the lawyers seem to think it’s impossible. So she’s creating a foundation. She’s naming it after herself, and she wants me to run it, and she’ll rewrite the trusts so I’ll be in charge of them next generation.”

  Eddie marveled at life’s twists. The fabled Hilliman trusts contained more money than any but a handful of American corporations earned in a year. The trusts provided for the needs and caprices of the scattered Hillimans, and provided uncountable wealth for the single member of each generation assigned as their custodian. Gary’s aunt was asking the self-proclaimed radical to take control of the family.

  “Are you going to accept?”

  “I don’t know. The foundation will give money to promote international understanding. Peace in our time. You know the kind of thing.” He hesitated. “Erebeth is the last of the third generation. The fourth—my mother’s generation—all died. There’s fifteen of us in the fifth.”

  “Your cousins will hate you.”

  Gary seemed not to hear. He gazed into the ocean, and found distant misty memories. “My grandfather—Erebeth’s older brother—wanted sons. He kept marrying new women, and they kept delivering daughters.” He laughed. Angrily. “I think my mother ran off with the chauffeur just to shock the family, but he was a great dad. Grandfather wanted to cut her off, but he couldn’t change the trusts. Erebeth—well, she’s different. More modern.”

  “Modern?”

  “I know, I know, you think she’s a big right-winger. But, Eddie, this idea of hers, the foundation, has lots of promise for the issues that you and I always…” He sighed, ran down, said nothing. “If I don’t…” Again he stopped. He shook his head, muttered something vulgar. His shoulders slumped. Temptation, temptation. “The cousins hate me already. Because of my father. And—well, because they do.”

  Eddie stood with his toes curled into the wet sand, thinking of his childhood on Martha’s Vineyard, and perfect worlds destroyed by the hard truth that we either grow old or die young. He thought about Aurelia. And about his sister and her baby. “Why did you bring me here, Gary? I can’t help you decide what to do.”

  “Erebeth wanted to meet you.”

  “Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gary took a long look at him, then laughed, the perennial outsider, and tossed his brandy snifter as far out as he could. They listened but heard no splash. “I don’t understand, either. She said she wanted you to come for the weekend so she could take your measure. She was very insistent, Eddie. She’s Erebeth Hilliman. She doesn’t give reasons. She gives orders.” He took Eddie’s glass, threw that one, too. Eddie had only been sipping, so brandy sloshed everywhere. Gary laughed again. “Maybe she plans to write you into the trusts.”

  (III)

  THE GUEST CHAMBER was big enough to dock an ocean liner. At four in the morning, Eddie woke to a rapping at the heavy door. Opening it a crack, he found Tamra peering at him, wearing a housecoat, blond hair awry. It took him a groggy moment to understand that the minor domo intended nothing lascivious. He was being summoned to the telephone. A servant stood behind her, a heavy terry-cloth bathrobe at the ready. There was an extension on the landing. He heard the familiar voice and sat down hard on the wicker seat.

  “I can’t stand this,” sobbed Junie. “It’s so unfair. Why do we have to make these choices?”

  She cried for a while, even though he could not work out from the few incoherent sentences she muttered what she was crying about. Second thoughts, he supposed. She did not want to give up the baby. He wondered whether she had been drinking, and remembered reading that some doctors thought alcohol was bad for the baby, and others thought it usefully relaxing for the mother. He calmed her down. He told her he loved her. He told her he could be in Cambridge in two hours. Weeping, she assured him she was feeling better and there was really no need for him to come, but he could not bear the thought of her pain. Upstairs, under Tamra’s supervision, the servant was already packing Eddie’s bags.

  “Gary was always her favorite,” the minor domo explained. “That’s why the cousins all hate him, Mr. Wesley. Erebeth has no children of her own, you see.” A ghost of a smile. “I very much doubt that Gary will be having children any time soon.”

  “But he’s engaged to—”

  “That governor’s niece. Yes. I read the papers. And yet I rather suspect that they will never wed.”

  A driver was waiting. The household assembled to see him off. Gary sent Junie his best. Erebeth’s glittering eyes said she had his measure. Tamra looked sad. When Eddie arrived in Cambridge, Junie was dressed, perky and smiling, and big as a house. He sensed that his sister was putting on her best face for him, and wished that she would not. She allowed him to buy her breakfast and wash the dishes, for the apartment was messy as ever. She refused to explain her crying jag, beyond referring to cold feet, and by midday had sent him on his way as if expecting a more important caller.

  In Harlem
two days later, he stole a few minutes with Aurelia, who laughed and told him pregnant women were always emotional. “I used to cry before every meal,” she assured him. “And half the time I was ready to wring Kevin’s neck. I didn’t need a reason.” But to Eddie every phenomenon had a cause.

  (IV)

  THE BABY GIRL arrived in July, scant weeks after Junie turned twenty-five. She sent Eddie a note to say that her “gentleman” had done his part, and everything was fine. She had subsequently gone up to Boston to visit their parents, and, in response to Marie Wesley’s pronouncement that she seemed pale and shaky and had gained weight, told them that the rigors of law school will do that to you. Marie wanted to send her to their family doctor for a checkup, and was surprised by the vehemence of her daughter’s resistance. But the temper, too, she put down to the same pressures. I admit I still feel a little bit guilty, Junie wrote, but I feel the future opening wide before the whole darker nation. I can hardly wait to get there.

  Me, too, Eddie wrote back.

  A month later, June Cranch Wesley left Cambridge with a girlfriend, the two of them driving to Chicago in a borrowed car, Junie to begin her clerkship at the federal courthouse, her friend to look for work.

  They never arrived.

  The car was later found at a rest stop in New Jersey, locked, undamaged, and packed tightly with their belongings. Both women had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 15

  The First Investigation

  (I)

  THE REST of the year passed in a slow-motion horror. At first the family clung to the possibility that Junie, always headstrong, had run off with some guy: nobody but Eddie knew about the baby, and Eddie was not about to tell his sister’s secrets. The trouble was, unless it was a double wedding, there was still the problem of explaining why the girlfriend, too, had disappeared. Had both run off with the same guy? With each other? The two families wondered, dithered, at last rejected the thought. The pendulum swung the other way. They were dead, no question. The Klan had done it. The New Jersey State Police. A wounded boyfriend. A crazed murderer who roamed the countryside. No. No. Never give up hope. Congregations all over Boston prayed for Junie. Big politicians stopped by the house, because Wesley Senior was connected. John Hynes, Boston’s mayor, promised his help. So did the formidable Joseph Kennedy, whose empire was said to extend into spaces so narrow not even the Scarletts of the world could wiggle in. Everyone kept clapping everyone on the back. Everyone kept insisting Junie would turn up. She would write a letter from Mexico, she would call for cash from Seattle, or, at worst, some kid would stumble over the remains in a ditch.

  Everyone said so.

  The police at first were solicitous. So was the press. Wesley Senior was a preacher of considerable prominence. In Boston, his endorsement meant thousands of votes. Detectives, captains, even the commissioner assured the family that their opposite numbers in and around New Jersey were doing all they could. Reporters, meanwhile, played up the story, at least locally. The family refused to give up hope.

  But time passed. Summer stretched into fall. No information was no information. There were other crimes for the police to solve, and other stories for reporters to write.

  The family did what they could. They called in favors and wrote letters. They buried the emptiness beneath a flurry of activity. They demanded, they cajoled, and finally they begged. The world marched on. In the end, so did the family. They had lives to lead. Marcella still had children to raise, and still had her undertaker to help. Wesley Senior still had a congregation to run. Eddie still had literary fame to pursue. Marie still had the rest of the family to worry about. By the start of 1958, the family’s closeness had begun to fray, as if Junie, the least reliable of them all, had been the gravity that drew them together. As the mystery faded from public memory—just another disappearance, these things happened, this, too, was life!—the mourning, too, receded, just as surely as the hope, and siblings and parents began to call and visit each other less frequently.

  Eddie, as it happened, was capable of an investigation that the others were not. He spoke only to Gary Fatek, who urged him to try. And so Eddie returned to Cambridge, where he had any number of friends. People he had never met willingly opened their doors upon learning that he was who he was, and the older brother of the vanished June Cranch Wesley into the bargain.

  Eddie spent the better part of two weeks nosing around, and, applying to a single purpose all the force of his personality, he was able to gather together the disparate strands of his sister’s law-school life. He chased rumor until he ran into blank walls, he distilled innuendo to find the powdery truths that precipitated out, he tracked snickers and jokes to their sources, finally uncovering the name of the professor with whom Junie had conducted her moderately clandestine affair; and who must have fathered, therefore, the vanished baby. Because he possessed an infinitude of energy but a micromitude of tact, Eddie decided, after a trio of unreturned telephone calls and a failed attempt to flirt his way past a protective secretary in Langdell Hall, to beard the gentleman on the doorstep of his smallish Tudor in Newton.

  The meeting went poorly.

  The professor, a youngish married man named Mellor, tried several strategies to avoid letting Eddie in the house, including a threat to call the police, and Eddie in his turn invited him to do so, whispering, however, that if he was going to be arrested in any case, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and therefore would barge into the kitchen, where Mrs. Mellor was sewing, to explain to her that the scrawny but charming Professor Mellor had fathered a child by the lone woman of the darker nation in the Harvard Law School class of 1957, now vanished. So they went into Benjamin Mellor’s closet-sized study instead, the poorly polished desk their only separation as Eddie asked his questions and the law professor told his lies.

  No, he did not really remember a June Wesley.

  Oh, yes, he did, she was in his contracts class.

  Yes, yes, that’s right, of course, she was in his seminar the following year.

  Now that you mention it, yes, that’s true, she did serve as his research assistant during her second summer, but only for a few weeks—still protesting—because she spent the rest of the summer interning at a law firm in the Midwest, and—

  Well, yes. She did research for him in the fall of her third year, too: it is just that there are so many of them, and it is so hard to keep—

  How many? Over the summer? Counting Junie?

  Well, ah, one.

  No, he never touched her, he was a married man.

  Yes, well, ah, they hugged once.

  Fine, there was also a kiss, he was human after all.

  All right, yes, perhaps the kiss did take place in her bed.

  And so on.

  “You’ll ruin me,” Mellor complained, speaking in the self-pitying whisper he had adopted ever since the collapse of his resistance at the door. The window gave onto an overgrown garden and a stone birdbath slopping with filthy water. “My career, my marriage, everything,” the father of Junie’s baby continued unhappily. “It’s not just me. I have two children.”

  “You mean, two other children,” said Eddie coldly.

  “That baby wasn’t mine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look. She came after me, not the other way around, okay? I know you think your sister was an angel, but, believe me, she was”—he hesitated, glanced at Eddie’s furious face, changed course—“hard to resist.”

  “And I have no doubt that your weakness of will shall serve as great comfort to both your dean and your wife.”

  Belatedly, the professor remembered his station in life; and Eddie’s. The gray eyes went flat and disdainful. He was a lawyer after all, and a Harvard professor. He would talk his way out of this. “What exactly do you want, Mr. Wesley? Money? Is this a shakedown? What?”

  “I want to know what happened to the baby.”

  Benjamin Mellor shrugged, smirked, shrugged it off. “Your guess is as go
od as mine. She said she was giving it up for adoption.”

  “I know that much.”

  “Well, then, you know as much as I do. I have no idea what they did with it.”

  Eddie leaned forward and laid his hands on the blotter, fixing Benjamin Mellor with one of the looks he had learned from Scarlett’s hard men. “Let’s do that one again,” he murmured.

  “Which one?”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “I told you, I don’t have any idea.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What?” By now Benjamin Mellor had shrunk against his aging chair, hands instinctively lifted, palms outmost, as though to ward off a blow. “How would I know where the baby is?” the professor whined. “It wasn’t my problem. It was her problem. I told her to get rid of it. I offered to pay. She wouldn’t. Don’t look at me like that. I have a family, and a career, and—”

  And that was as far as he got. Eddie had a knee on the desk and a firm grip on the professor’s collar and another on his necktie. Eddie jerked him forward so hard that he bit his tongue, then jerked him backward but yanked the tie before his head could strike the window. For Benjamin Mellor it was like being punched twice, but Eddie knew what he was doing: the chair never even squeaked, and the professor’s wife, two rooms away, never heard a thing.

  Eddie leaned close and whispered in the stunned man’s ear: “You don’t have any idea what they did with the baby. That’s what you said, right? But you know who they are, don’t you? Junie said you did your part. You couldn’t take any chances. Who were they, Professor? Who helped Junie?”

  Benjamin Mellor showed an unexpected pluck. He removed Eddie’s hand from the crisp white shirt and stood to his full height. He might have projected the perfect image of the brilliant scholar he no doubt was, but for the tremor in his voice, and the fear in his eyes. “Your premise is mistaken,” he said coldly. “I wasn’t the one who helped her do whatever she did. When I said they, I was referring to your sister and that girl who disappeared with her. Sharon Martindale. Her white friend. I don’t know where they took the baby, but they went together.”