Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “She must have told you something,” said Eddie, ready to grab him again.

  The law professor stroked his goateed chin. “Your sister came to see me before she left for Chicago. Came to my office. She said she was sorry about the way things had worked out. I said the same. She said she was sorry to have gotten me into this”—he saw something in Eddie’s face, and raised a hand for calm—“and I told her I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” He hesitated. Caution? A fugitive emotion? Eddie could no longer tell. “She wished me well in my career. I wished her well in hers. She started to laugh. Then she started to cry. And then she said”—another instant’s hesitation—“she said thank you.” The professor dropped his eyes. “I never saw her again.”

  (II)

  THE THANK YOU BOTHERED EDDIE Wesley, and he suspected that the professor was romancing. Benjamin Mellor, after all, had done Junie no favors. He had not even helped place the baby for adoption.

  Eddie remained in Cambridge for two more days, asking more questions. Benjamin Mellor came from a distinguished academic family. He did not have a reputation for fooling around with his students. People described him as devoted to his family, and enormously ambitious, hoping for more than a Harvard professorship. An affair would thus carry double risk. What would make a man like that choose Junie? Or make Junie choose him? There were depths to his sister that Eddie had yet to plumb, but at least he was making progress.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Other Half of Truth

  (I)

  EDDIE FELT NO SENSE of triumph. He had not even found his sister’s baby, let alone his sister. He returned to Convent Avenue, but Harlem was cheerless. The same disordered energy that had long excited him now exhausted him. He stood in the huge crowd outside Abyssinian Baptist Church, paying his respects to W. C. Handy. The great composer, in his eighties, had finally succumbed to the aftereffects of a stroke, and Eddie thought there might be an essay in it. Afterward, he sat in the window of his study, staring at the brownstones across the street, pencil in hand, notebook at the ready, and nothing came. He breakfasted at Chock full o’ Nuts, he lunched at the Colony Club with Kasten, his literary agent. He dined with his friend Charlie Bing, the dentist, and his wife, Chamonix, at their apartment on Saint Nicholas Avenue, but their beautiful marriage wounded him. At the salons, he picked fights with famous intellectuals over differences he could scarcely articulate. Gary Fatek dragged him to a couple of rallies at Union Square, one against the bomb, the other against the American invasion of Lebanon. Eddie listened to the speeches and felt himself distinctly unmoved. He spent what little money he had saved on a firm of private detectives, who took his retainer and reported no trace. The detectives had visited every adoption agency within four hours of Cambridge, but the few who could be persuaded or bribed to open their records had no mother named June Wesley, and nobody remembered two girls, one white and one black, coming in together. Frustrated, Eddie shouted at the head of the firm over the telephone, but the man had heard worse.

  “Who are these people?” he said to Aurelia, when she took the time to try to cheer him. “How are they doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  Eddie did not know how to articulate his growing suspicion that some malevolent force was at work, and Aurelia was not prepared to tease it out of him. Zora, at one and a half, kept her pregnant mother busy, and by all accounts aglow with happiness. But Aurie heard of Eddie’s state and managed to steal a few minutes for a walk on Riverside Drive on a sunny afternoon. She pushed a shiny stroller from the midst of which, swaddled in pink-striped blankets, peeked her daughter’s plumply innocent brown face. Eddie gazed down at the child of another man and felt the earth heave. Everywhere he looked were women pushing strollers, some of them mothers, some of them grandmothers, some of them nannies, and none of them Junie, or pushing Junie’s baby, or, for that matter, his. He turned to Aurelia and saw a beautiful foreigner.

  “You have to move on, Eddie,” she was saying—whether about Junie or about Aurie she left unclear. “You still have a life to lead.”

  Eddie nodded but said nothing. He was trying to keep the sidewalk steady beneath his feet. Aurelia was a year older than he, but spoke with an authority and a diffidence that suggested a greater span.

  “You need to write,” she said. “The muse.”

  He managed a flickery smile.

  “Oh, and, darling,” she continued, “you should get married.”

  “To whom?”

  Aurelia gestured upward, past the parkland lining Riverside Drive, toward the apartment towers of Harlem. “Any of those silly girls you dated in between me.”

  Eddie only shook his head. He glanced at the stroller. To proclaim his love for Aurelia would seem, in the current situation, fatuous. Instead, he told her the other half of the truth. “Right now, I need to find Junie.”

  She touched his arm, the sanely compassionate soul delivering bad news. “You mean, you need to find out what happened to her.”

  “No. I need to find her.”

  Aurelia’s face slipped gently from schoolmarm to imp, and, for a moment, he supposed she probably did love him after all.

  “If you need to find her, then find her,” she said.

  “I can’t. I don’t know where to look.”

  Practical, practical: “Either you go search for Junie, or you go back to your life. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I’ll have it any way I want,” he said, astonished at his own sharpness, and probably wanting to pick a fight.

  Aurelia, however, was now all mother. She seemed sturdy and confident. Battling an ex-lover was beneath her dignity. She stepped lightly away, her body between him and the stroller. She adjusted the blankets as if afraid her daughter would overhear. “Not that you care,” she murmured, acting with her back, “but I meant to tell you. You know that cross you asked me about years ago? Well, Kevin has one just like it.”

  It took Eddie a few seconds to remember what cross she meant. Castle seemed several lifetimes ago. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t care.”

  Aurelia’s eyes narrowed. “I see.”

  Eddie could not stop. “It’s easy for you to be blasé. You have everything. And Junie—well, she’s my sister, not yours.”

  “I adore Junie.”

  “It’s not the same, and you know it.” He saw her face. He softened. “I’m sorry, Aurie. I shouldn’t take it out on you. I’m just not good company right now.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not.” He expected anger. Reproach. Maybe even a slap. Instead, Aurelia favored him with the old smile. “Call me when you are.”

  He watched her join the crowd, one more mother in the parade, the darker nation displaying with fierce pride its hopes for a richer future, a future Junie had hoped to spend her life helping to win.

  (II)

  EDDIE’S OTHER FRIENDS were full of advice. Kasten, his agent, proposed that he battle his demons on the typewriter. Eddie dined with Gary Fatek and two of the millionaire’s many adoring women. After dinner they walked through the park, the women up front, the men trailing like bodyguards. Gary had broken off his engagement to the governor’s niece, just as Tamra has predicted. Eddie was not sure where matters stood just now with Mona.

  “I never had a sister,” said Gary, “and the cousins hate me. But if I did have one? I’d like her to be like Junie.” He slipped an arm across Eddie’s shoulders. “And I’d always fight for her. I’d never stop kicking down doors.”

  Eddie glanced at the two women, vibrant and young and white, treating Central Park, even at night, like their own front yard: the purpose, in fact, for which Frederick Law Olmsted had originally designed it. Once upon a time, the police had patrolled to keep the riffraff out, limiting its use to the rich who lived along Fifth Avenue.

  “You’re a Hilliman, Gary. You’ve never had to kick in your life. You just raise your hand to knock on a door, and somebody will always open it.”

  “You know I don’t
believe in that system of—”

  “I’m just saying, it’s easier for you. It’s different for me.”

  Gary was aghast. “You can’t be thinking of stopping. Eddie, you can’t. Your sister needs you.”

  Eddie had a different thought. “If she wanted my help,” he said, “she’d have found a way to reach me.”

  They had drinks at a trendy café on the Upper West Side. The extra girlfriend wanted to go somewhere, but Eddie didn’t.

  (III)

  BY THIS TIME, a few of the bolder tabloids had picked up the Los Alamos story. NEGRO WRITER FORESAW SCIENTIST’S DEATH, murmured one, on an inside page. A paper aimed at the darker nation was more alarming: WESLEY’S TALE SPARKS SUICIDE, it pronounced. Another, its readership mostly supernaturalists, engaged in what journalists call burying the lede: NEW PSYCHIC IN HARLEM! Eddie encouraged the nonsense by refusing to comment, a refusal that Kasten, his agent, called wisdom itself—even though Eddie’s reasons had nothing to do with his career. Meanwhile, at Kasten’s insistence, Eddie attended a dinner party down in Greenwich Village hosted by his editor. At his table was a Times reporter named David Yee, just back from North Carolina, where he had visited the heavily barricaded town of Maxton, the site of a pitched battle a couple of months back between the Lumbee Indians and a band of Klansmen and camp followers variously estimated in the hundreds or the thousands, who were trying to burn a cross near the town, which was mostly Negroes and Indians. The Lumbee ordered the Klansmen off. The Klansmen resisted. Shots were fired. The Klansmen fled. David told the table that there was nothing much to see. The town was just a town, the empty field was just an empty field. The Indians did not want to talk about what had happened. The Negroes were grateful but equally stinting in their willingness to divulge details. It was, said David, as if the entire incident was already falling down an Orwellian memory hole. But Eddie, who now carried his leather-bound notebook everywhere, scribbled a summary in case he later wanted it.

  David Yee said he had heard that the Lumbee resistance was largely organized by a group called the Agony, or something similar—had anyone heard of it? Eddie did not raise his hand. But a woman at the other end of the table asked if that was the same group that had firebombed the offices of a right-wing tabloid in Saint Louis. A college kid piped up that one of his professors had mentioned it—didn’t they blow up an empty police car in Texas or someplace? Eddie stared at the college kid and remembered Hoover’s claim that Jewel Agony would recruit the young and the educated.

  I’d keep kicking down doors.

  At the end of March, Eddie went up to Boston, only to find his mother shrunken and his father without fire. He was astonished. His own depression he had accepted as a matter of course. He was a writer, and young, and therefore possessed an entitlement to moodiness, even despair. But he had always seen his parents, whatever his differences with them, through the eyes of a child. They seemed to Eddie larger and more powerful than life itself. It had never occurred to him that they could be defeated by it. They pressed desultory questions about his life in New York, and asked him to remember them to various friends. They prayed over dinner, and again before bed, as in the old days, but the words, even from Wesley Senior, sounded rote. The silent breakfast was even worse. Their listlessness somehow swallowed his, and Eddie found the spark rekindled. If you need to find her, then find her. His parents were old, he realized. They were no longer capable of doing what had to be done. Someone had to continue the search for Junie, and that someone had to be him. Wesley Senior and Marie were mourning, persuaded despite their optimistic words that their daughter was dead. Eddie decided he would accept that opinion when somebody showed him her grave.

  On his second evening at home, he sat with his downcast father in the study.

  “I would be grateful if you would telephone a friend of yours on my behalf,” Eddie said.

  (IV)

  AT THIS TIME, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was among the richest men in the United States, and therefore in the world. He had investments in real estate, in Hollywood, in transportation, but the crown jewel of his empire was the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Some people whispered that he had made a good deal of illegal money during Prohibition, but so had everyone else. There seemed to be nobody in politics he didn’t know, and nobody who didn’t owe him favors. Kennedy himself had been Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, and his eldest surviving son was planning to make a forceful run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1960, two years hence, even though experts did not see how the Republicans could lose. Yet, for a man who exercised such influence, Joe Kennedy was surprisingly ill known. He maintained a modest suite of offices in a run-down building on a claustrophobic side street in South Boston. Not many Negroes visited this part of town, but Eddie was an old hand, and driven besides. Close to seventy, Kennedy retained an athlete’s slimness and a general’s personal force. Hard eyes watched the world with satisfaction from behind round rimless glasses. He had the long fingers of the pianist and the powerful wrists of the laborer. He had enjoyed a famous affair with Gloria Swanson. Everybody addressed him as Ambassador.

  “Edward. Great to see you.”

  The Ambassador rose from behind his desk and led his guest to a table by the window. The river was a distant smear. Eddie had expected aides to be present, but the two men met alone. Kennedy was a busy man, but Eddie knew from years of listening at his parents’ table that Kennedy owed Wesley Senior any number of favors. Over the years, a coalition of Negro preachers led by Eddie’s father had turned out thousands of their congregants to vote for Democratic candidates. It was this debt that Eddie intended to call in now.

  “Your parents must be very proud of you.”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “Take it from a father. I know they are.”

  Eddie nodded his thanks. Around the room were photographs of Kennedy’s many children, from Joseph Junior, the oldest, who had been killed in action, to Teddy, the baby, now a lawyer, with whom Eddie had occasionally played in the old days on Cape Cod.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” said the Ambassador, eyes watchful. “June was such a wonderful young lady. The Archbishop has the whole Diocese praying for her.”

  “We’re grateful,” Eddie assured him. In point of fact, Eddie believed in the efficacy of prayer even less than he believed in the existence of God, and he believed in God not at all; but he knew that the Joseph Kennedys of the world—like the Maceo Scarletts—liked it when you felt gratitude toward them.

  “As I told your father, I would do anything to help.” The eyes appraised him from behind those round glasses. “And that’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s why I’m here.” Time for the pitch. “This is a terrible time for a mother and father.” Inclining his head toward the photographs, because two of the pictured children were dead. “The pain of loss is terrible enough. The pain of not knowing is worse.”

  Kennedy nodded, dragging it out of him.

  “Mr. Ambassador, let me be frank.”

  “By all means.”

  “They say you know people everywhere. They say you have connections where others have no idea that it is possible to have connections. They say you have sources of information others could never imagine.”

  “I know a few people,” said the Ambassador, and Eddie had the sense that he was enjoying himself.

  “What I would like to ask—as a favor to my father, in return for his services, and also as a favor to me—and I, too, would place myself in your debt”—Eddie felt himself botching the carefully rehearsed lines, but it was too late to turn back—“what I would like to ask, Mr. Ambassador, is that you use your sources of information to discover whatever you can about what happened to my sister.”

  For a while they sat there, studying each other, the old pol and the young writer, using the shared silence to feel each other out. At last Kennedy got to his feet. He waved Eddie to remain seated, then ambled over to his desk. “I’d be a
fine one to wait to be asked,” he said. “I owe your father a great deal, and whatever meager resources may be mine to command, they are at his service at any time.” He took a folder from the blotter and sat once more, crossing one leg easily over the other. “Understand, Edward, I think you exaggerate my capabilities and my connections. I’m a businessman. Nothing more. Of course, I have my people.” He opened the folder, studied a page, but Eddie knew it was all ruse. Kennedy already knew what was written there, and he expected Eddie to accept that this single gift, whatever its contents, was all: after this, the debts he owed Wesley Senior were paid. “My people have made certain inquiries. Understand, I did not want to bother your father in his grief.”

  “I understand.”

  “I have associates who are in the business of transport,” Kennedy said, without specifying precisely what they transported, or how. “My associates tell me that friends of theirs might—I emphasize might—might possibly have been involved in transporting a young Negro woman who may or may not have fit your sister’s description, at approximately the time of her disappearance.” Having shrouded the facts in sufficient uncertainty to make it impossible for Eddie to testify that he ever had any actual knowledge, the Ambassador put the paper back. “These friends of my associates believe—only believe—that a substantial fee might well have been paid for their services.”

  He stopped, making Eddie ask. His hand was trembling. His voice was hoarse: “Transported her where?”

  “It is possible—again, I emphasize, only possible—that she was dropped at an address in Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “And do they—do you—know the address?”

  “The possible address,” said the Ambassador piously. He drew another sheet from the folder, handed it over, and waited while Eddie memorized it and handed it back.

  “Mr. Ambassador, I don’t know what to say.”

  Kennedy had an arm around his shoulders, walking him to the door. “You do understand, Edward, the odds are that this is a wild-goose chase.”