Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “I understand.”

  “It was probably another girl.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  The Ambassador studied him, thinking, perhaps, of his own children. “She was lucky to have a brother like you.”

  “No, sir. I was lucky to have a sister like her.”

  Only when Eddie was out on the street again did it occur to him that both of them had used the past tense.

  CHAPTER 17

  An Unexpected Meeting

  (I)

  “IT ISN’T ANY of your business,” said Mona Veazie. So smoothly did she tip the porter handling her bags that Aurelia almost missed it. Mona’s mother, Amaretta, Czarina-in-chief, stood stoically several yards away, a dark, tiny woman beneath a mountain of fur. An animated Gary Fatek stood beside her. The platform was two levels beneath Manhattan. People bumped and jostled, all of them heading somewhere, or wishing somebody was not. Steam curled as engines started up. Pantographs sparked electricity. If her daughter’s imminent departure for three years in Chicago caused Amaretta Veazie any concern, she hid it well. “No matter what Eddie does,” Mona continued, fingers resting lightly on her friend’s shoulder, “it isn’t any of your business. Can you try to remember that while I’m away?”

  Aurie dropped her eyes. “I wish you weren’t going.”

  “Why? Afraid you’ll make another mistake without me around?”

  “Another mistake?”

  “With Eddie.” Mona touched Aurelia’s swollen belly. “Don’t forget who you are now, honey.” She was up on the step. She glanced at her mother, who nodded indulgently at one of Gary’s jokes like a woman not straining to overhear every word of her daughter’s conversation. “Junie is Eddie’s sister. Not yours. This is Eddie’s problem. Not yours.”

  “I know people. I could help.”

  “And get yourself in more trouble.”

  “You don’t think much of me, do you?”

  “I think the world of you, honey.” A kiss on the forehead. “And I know I owe you. If you need me, I’m just a phone call away.”

  “And a long train ride,” said Aurelia, grumpily.

  The conductor called all aboard. Hugs all around. Gary kissed Mona on the lips. Then he did it again. Amaretta turned red. She was known to believe that the millionaire was sowing his wild oats before marrying someone white and important. Aurelia secretly agreed, and suspected that Mona did, too, or she would not be leaving. Gary gave Amaretta his arm. Mona was not the sort to linger in the doorway waving last giggly goodbyes. She had vanished before the train cleared the platform, riding onward to greater things, starting with her post-doctorate fellowship at the University of Chicago. Aurelia felt left behind, in more ways than one.

  Amaretta stood between the two young people. “There’s only one reason people ever run away,” she said.

  “What reason is that?”

  “Because they don’t want to get caught.”

  Gary, for once, did not offer a ride, pleading other business. The two women, today’s Czarina and tomorrow’s, shared a taxi uptown. They spoke little. Aurelia wanted to ask Amaretta whether she had been speaking of Junie or her own daughter, but you did not ask questions of Amaretta Veazie. Unless you wanted to be frozen out of society, you listened to her wisdom and you did what she told you. Challenging Amaretta, Langston Hughes liked to say, was about as much use as challenging the Pope.

  As the cab began to climb Sugar Hill, the older woman grabbed her hand. “It’s not young Mr. Wesley who needs your help, dear. It’s your Kevin.”

  Aurie’s turn to blush. Amaretta had heard after all. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Veazie.”

  “I believe you know exactly what I mean.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Amaretta’s eyes were pale green and unforgiving, the eyes of Judgment Day. “We need Kevin. And, yes, young Mr. Wesley is a writer, and his father does civil rights. There are hundreds of Negro writers, Aurelia, and thousands of preachers for civil rights. There is only one Garland heir.”

  “Oliver and Derek are Garlands, too. And there’s Cerinda and her brood out in the Midwest—”

  “There is only one heir,” Amaretta repeated. She pointed toward Aurelia’s womb. “By the grace of God, you will bear the next.”

  (II)

  ACTUALLY, MONA HAD CAUGHT an earlier train than the sleeper she originally intended to take. Kevin Garland had expected his wife and her best buddy to spend hours out on the town before departure time. Thus he was unprepared for Aurie’s arrival at Edgecombe Avenue shortly after sundown. She decided to be quiet, to give her husband a nice surprise. She did not know what Amaretta had been blabbing about. She did not want to know. She would make love to her husband and, for now, forget everything else. She remembered the night Kevin had snuck up on her in the shower when she thought he was out of town. Now she would pay him back. In the hallway, she glanced around, then undid a couple of buttons on her blouse. She slipped her key in the lock as silently as she knew how. She gave the door a quiet shove. It was jerked away from her, and Aurelia tumbled into the apartment. She would have hit the floor, but a strong hand was already clamped around her wrist. A white hand. Four men sat in the parlor where she did her receiving, two of them black, two of them white, one of them Kevin. All four heads were turned, astonished. She stood before them, humiliated, blouse half undone. The fifth man, beside the door, was still clutching her wrist. His face was pleasant. His hair was ash blond, and smooth. His eyes were as chilly as the grave.

  “Let go of my wife,” said Kevin, with a force that secretly impressed her.

  Her captor looked to one of the seated white men. Wispy hair, paler than his flesh, made hopeless designs here and there on his mottled head. His voice was all quiet authority. “Please do as Mr. Garland says, Mr. Collier.”

  At once she was released. Kevin advanced toward the door, furious. His eyes bulged. Aurelia had never seen him this way. She shrank away, fumbling with the buttons, but she was not the target of his ire. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on my wife again—”

  The blond man inclined his head. “Sorry, sir,” he murmured, voice steady but amused, as if he wanted the room to know how little the show of anger bothered him.

  Kevin tried to put his arm around his wife, but she squirmed away. Everyone looked embarrassed. Kevin did his best. He said, “Of course you know Perry Mount,” but Aurelia had already recognized Harlem’s golden boy, the most desirable bachelor in Sugar Hill now that Kevin was spoken for. Perry nodded and smiled as though they were old friends, and Aurie nodded back, but secretly he gave her the creeps. A glance passed between Perry Mount and the strange Mr. Collier, a complicity she neither appreciated nor understood. Kevin, meanwhile, continued working hard to smooth things over. “And may I present Senator Elliott Van Epp, and his son-in-law, Congressman Lanning Frost. Senator, Congressman—my wife, Aurelia.”

  Handshakes. Apologies. Murmurs about how rumors of her beauty failed to do her justice.

  “And Mr. Collier is the Senator’s bodyguard,” said Kevin, still seething.

  Aurelia had never heard of a Senator with a bodyguard. She wondered whether a member of the Senate had ever been assassinated, and it occurred to her, disloyally, that Kevin would have no idea, but Eddie would have the answer off pat. “Well, Mr. Collier is good at his job,” Aurie said, still rubbing her wrist.

  “He won’t ever be allowed in this apartment again,” her husband promised.

  “I don’t actually give a shit,” she assured him with a chilly smile.

  “We should get going,” said the Senator, eyes kind. “Thank you for your hospitality, Kevin.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt your meeting,” said Aurelia.

  “We were just about done.”

  Lanning Frost shook his head. “I thought we still had left to discuss the way to resolve whatever problems we’ve
decided, or else to establish whether our present difficulties in relation to long-range concerns.”

  Aurie stared. She had heard that Frost planned to run one day for his father-in-law’s Senate seat. His face was strong and attractive, his voice was flowing and mellifluous, but his mind was mutton.

  “We’re done,” the Senator repeated, with more force.

  Congressman Frost nodded sheepishly and apologized again. Perry had everybody’s coats. Mr. Collier was already in the hall. Aurelia wondered about that look between them. Two minutes later, she was alone with her husband.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” Kevin began, arms open with awkward affection. “It’s just work. Something for my father. If I’d known you were coming back early, I never would have scheduled a meeting—”

  “I want to move.”

  Kevin seemed not to get it. He tried to help with the buttons. She slapped at his hand. “Move? Move where?”

  “Out of Harlem. Forever.”

  “Honey, what happened? What’s wrong?”

  “We can keep the apartment. You can use it when you have to be here on business. But I am not raising my children around these people.”

  Aurelia checked on Zora, then went into the bedroom and locked the door. She began changing her clothes, and was down to her slip when she felt the new baby kick. She looked at herself in the mirror. She folded her hands over her roundness. She had no complaints. Not really. Kevin loved her, and she—well, she appreciated him. Kevin had not lost the capacity to surprise her. The people he met. The people who wanted to meet him. She knew little of her husband’s business, and did not really want to know more. What she wanted was his children.

  She stopped smiling, and sat down, hard.

  She remembered Amaretta’s words in the taxi just minutes ago, and, a year and a half ago, Kevin sitting beside this very bed, holding his shoe, and announcing that he needed a boy. An image swam upward in her mind, swift and unbidden. The purpose of tonight’s meeting. And she knew, in her bones, that the image was accurate, even if she did not yet understand exactly what it meant.

  One heir was being introduced to the other.

  Heirs to what? she wondered. But there was nobody she dared ask.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Twenty

  (I)

  EDDIE OWNED a car befitting his station, a long red Cadillac DeVille convertible. He told everyone he needed time on his own, and everyone agreed. Everyone wished him Godspeed. Everyone needed time away from him. His second novel would be published in October, they told each other, and a vacation would do him a world of good. Charlie Bing listed people he should try to see. Gary Fatek offered his friend the use of the Kentucky compound built by the Southern branch of the family, then called back, chastened, to say that the Southern branch had vetoed it. But Eddie had never counted on it. Old Mr. Pond, the barber, who had not been south since the 1930s, warned him not to drive at night down there. Kasten urged him to take copious notes. Only Aurelia guessed that her ex-lover’s purpose might not be what it seemed, but she was too busy mothering to tease it out of him, and, besides, she was pretty sure he owed her an apology.

  He left Harlem on a Monday, in August of 1958, a bit more than a year after Junie’s disappearance, and four months after the birth of Aurelia’s second child. He motored south. At this time, it was still difficult for a Negro to count on hotel accommodations. When planning a car trip, especially south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it was best to have friends at the ready. Eddie stopped overnight in Baltimore, where he stayed with a cousin of Charlie’s, a member of the city council. The cousin turned out to be a fan. They sat up talking about revolution. In the morning, he was off. He stopped again in Richmond, this time at the home of a prosperous Negro lawyer who tried civil-rights cases on the side. The two men had never met, but the lawyer had written Eddie a complimentary note when the novel came out, Eddie had written back, and so had begun a friendly correspondence. The lawyer possessed contacts in Nashville society. He knew the McKissacks and the Campbells and the other prominent Negro families. He gave Eddie letters of introduction. Eddie continued south. He reached Nashville three days after leaving Manhattan. All the clans gracefully received Eddie into their homes. They wanted to talk about his novel, about the Harlem literary scene. Had he met Arna Bontemps, who hailed from these parts? What about Richard Wright? Perhaps even the greatest of them all, Langston Hughes? Eddie tried to engage in polite banter but was not able to hide his impatience. They directed him to the address Joe Kennedy had supplied.

  It was a vacant lot in a Negro neighborhood, house recently destroyed by fire.

  Eddie asked around, but in a different tier of black society. In the barroom of a colored hotel, he found a couple of half-drunken witnesses. They were interested in getting drunker. Yes, they said, but a lot of young women had been in and out of the house, along with a lot of young men. They were too far gone to recognize Junie’s photograph, and Eddie wondered whether they were only remembering what they thought he wanted them to. They argued vehemently with each other over when the fire had occurred. The next day, Eddie presented himself at the offices of the city’s largest newspaper, but was told the archives were for employees only. The public library was closed to readers of his nation. The local Negro weekly had covered the fire, but its bound volumes were haphazardly kept. Finally, he found the story. The house had burned just this past March, around the time of Eddie’s argument with Aurelia on Riverside Drive. Nobody had died. Nobody was injured. Early reports blamed “an incendiary device,” although the paper misspelled the adjective, switching the “n” and the “d.” In the next edition, the fire marshal labeled the blaze accidental. The residents were squatters, the articles sniffed. Nobody owned the house, which had been condemned by the city as a firetrap. At the home of his patient hosts, Eddie sat up half the night, worrying over his notes.

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  He realized that there was a question he had neglected to ask. The following night, he tracked down his new friends from the bar. No, they said, they had no idea what had happened to the residents. But there was this rumor, said the livelier and more inventive of the pair, that some of them were white. The other man said this was ridiculous, nobody white would live in the neighborhood. As the two men fought, a woman across the bar caught Eddie’s eye, beckoning with her head. Eddie left the pair and sidled into her booth. She was taller than he, and older. Her name was Marva. He bought her another drink, but when he asked her the same questions, it turned out that Marva had invited him over merely in the line of business. He pressed her anyway. The house was only two blocks away. If she plied her trade in this area, she must have seen something. Marva flirted on general principles but found her mark unresponsive. She was ready to leave the table, but Eddie kept at her. At last she admitted to having befriended a couple of the girls from the house. Eddie passed her Junie’s picture. Marva studied it for a long time, and he felt a surge of excitement when a spark of recognition leaped in her eyes. But she handed it back with a shrug.

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “It’s important.”

  “I can’t help you, baby.”

  Eddie put into his voice all the sincerity he could. “Please, Marva. I’m her brother.”

  Marva shook her head. He offered her money. Offended, she handed it back. Eddie knew a brick wall when he saw one. Junie, in her sweetness, had always touched a fierce protectiveness in those around her, but Eddie knew better than to construct a positive from Marva’s negative. Maybe the reason she said she did not recognize the photograph was that she did not recognize the photograph. There was a line in Field’s Unified Theory that seemed to apply. Heading back to the nicer part of the Negro community, the same pair of headlights locked on his tail the whole way, Eddie quoted it to himself: “Neither hope nor love provides evidence of truth.”

  (II)

  EDDIE LEFT in the morning but did not return at once to New York. Instead, he drove e
ast and southeast. He took his time. In a couple of towns he found colored hotels. Another night he slept in his car at a truck stop, but was rousted by the police, whose manner suggested that lingering another hour in town would prove hazardous. He wondered whether they had been ordered to roust him. On the fourth day, he reached Charleston, where the Civil War had begun. In the middle of the twentieth century, Charleston was probably the most segregated city in the United States. From his hosts in Nashville he had the address of a Negro woman who rented out rooms. Through her he found a Negro lawyer. The Negro lawyer introduced him to a reasonably liberal white lawyer, who helped him to find the lawyer he actually needed, a balding man named Witter, who agreed sniffily to pass an envelope, unopened, to his client, who in turn, to Witter’s surprise, agreed to the meeting.

  “This is against my advice,” Witter said.

  Eddie said that he understood.

  “Don’t you say anything to upset Mrs. Castle. She’s been through a lot.”

  Eddie promised to behave.

  The meeting was not at the lawyer’s office, or at the Castle residence near the harbor, but instead at the blinding-white Methodist church near the town green. Leona Castle seemed to be sending a message, even if it was not clear to Eddie who the recipient might be. They sat in pews near the back of the sanctuary, the widow, several church sisters, the pastor, a deacon, and not one but two lawyers. Eddie wondered whether any black congregants ever sat here. He would have preferred to meet with Mrs. Castle alone, but this was Charleston, not Manhattan, and there was no point in asking.

  Eddie had prepared an entire speech. Condolences. Admiration for her husband, especially his activism on behalf of civil rights, a tiny part of his oeuvre, although Eddie planned to overblow it considerably. And, slowly, slowly, rounding toward his true purpose, the pink envelope of which Emil had spoken at Aurelia’s wedding: the bargaining chip he needed.