“You have to understand, Eddie. The Junie you thought you knew was not the only Junie. You’re her brother, but you weren’t the one who shared her secrets. I was. Don’t look at me that way. You never held her head when she was throwing up in the gutter in Cambridge because she had too much to drink, and you never had her slap your face for doing it. You weren’t there when the bottom fell out of her life after the baby’s father dropped her, and you weren’t there when she had her big bust-up with Phil Castle. To you she was this helpless innocent you had to protect, but in her mind she was conquering the world. Do you really think convention would have held her back? Did you think Harvard Law School was a convent? She took the train down to New York City almost every weekend her first year and a half in law school. Did she ever call you? Did you know she was in town? No and no, right? Junie lived her own life, Eddie. It didn’t revolve around your expectations of her.”
Eddie said nothing. He wondered whether Perry could sense his shrinking from this diminution of his sister’s purity. Junie had told him to his face that the father of her half-white child was the only man she had ever been with. Had she lied to the brother who loved her? Had she perhaps meant that Professor Mellor was the only white man she had been with? Was Perry lying now? After all, when Eddie had asked Junie on Christmas Eve if Perry was the father, she had answered “Yuch.” Or was the true June Cranch Wesley—as her brother was beginning to suspect—a mysterious woman to whom neither he nor Perry Mount had ever gained full access?
“We talked about you a lot,” the golden boy resumed after a moment, and Eddie felt as if Perry was reading his mind. “She was so proud of you, Eddie. Proud, but also a little scared. Junie knew how you thought of her. Most of us, we’re worried about living up to our fathers’ expectations, maybe our mothers’. Junie couldn’t have cared less about that. All she cared about was her image in her big brother’s eyes. She didn’t want to let you down.” A harsh laugh. The anger was still very near the surface. “I’ll tell you something else. She never wanted you to know. About the baby. First she thought about having an abortion, then she thought about adoption. All that she could deal with. But not your disapproval. She was going to keep the baby secret from you, but I changed her mind. I really pushed her hard, Eddie. Know why?” Eddie knew. He didn’t know. He felt his purpose crumbling around him, which perhaps was Perry’s intention. “Because, if she didn’t tell you, she’d always wonder. How you would have reacted. If you would have loved her anyway. I won’t say Junie was testing the limits of your love for her, but she finally agreed to tell you because otherwise she would torture herself worrying. That’s the truth, Eddie. That’s what happened.”
They were no longer in motion. They were standing on the lawn, no closer than men who hate each other will, but still close enough to fight. “You said you were her fiancé,” said Eddie, dully. “You said you were getting married.”
Perry hesitated, and seemed, for the first time, uneasy. “All right. So I asked her at a weak moment. It still counts, doesn’t it? She still said yes. I asked her when she was crying over being thrown over by her baby’s father, and she still said yes. She wouldn’t take a ring, she hated what it implied, and besides, she said she could never show it to her parents. I didn’t understand her. I tried to tell her that after the baby came I would love it as much as—”
Perry stopped. Perhaps he recognized, as Eddie did, the moment when he crossed from angry explanation to childish whining.
“I’m going to find her, Eddie. One way or another. I don’t want your help. I don’t need it. If you keep trying, you’ll be in my way.”
“And you’ll be in Asia, working for the State Department, right? What are you going to do, search Tokyo and Hong Kong?” You do it for different reasons. Pride. Fury. Fear. King-of-the-hill. Eddie had not been in a real fight since his days with Scarlett, and, before that, since the Army. But now he was suddenly up in Perry’s face. “I think you’re a coward, Perry. You’re not looking for her. You’re running away.”
Eddie waited for the punch. He was not any kind of brawler, as his quick knockdown by the boys at the Newark train station had proved. No matter. More than at any time in his life, he needed to be hit, and to hit back—and who better to provoke than Perry Mount, the golden boy, who loved Junie and pretended to himself that they were engaged, who had used this opportunity to smear her memory for no apparent gain, and who used to swing his fists at any excuse when they were children, even knowing that Eddie would kick the shit out of him?
But Perry neither swung nor fled.
Instead he said, “Okay, Eddie. Unball those fists. I don’t want to fight you. It’s fine. You can go on searching.”
Eddie could not believe his ears. “You think I need your permission? Who do you think you are?”
Perry was not even interested. He had his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think you’re up to it, Eddie. I don’t think you can find her. But if you do, let me know. I can help you both.”
“If you think for one minute—”
“Now, about this Sharon business.” Glancing around, as if afraid somebody would hear them and he would lose his sinecure at State. “Yes, I dated Sharon Martindale for a while. No, I never tried to burn down the house. Why would I do that? The Martindales have everything mixed up, as usual. I’m sorry to burst your bubble again, Eddie, but it was Junie and Sharon who set the fire—by accident, smoking marijuana in the bedroom when her parents were away—and I’m the one they called to clean up the damage and make everything nice before the Martindales got back. That’s all.”
“Why the subterfuge? Why did you let them think your name was Ferdinand?”
A careless shrug. “Junie called me Ferdinand sometimes. Sharon heard it. She liked it, and made me use it, even around her parents. Kind of like a private joke.”
Eddie frowned. He felt he was missing something obvious. It was all too fluid. Too pat. Perry had an answer for everything. And yet he and Junie were close—
Oh!
“One more question,” said Eddie.
“Not about Sharon.”
“No. About Junie.” He hesitated. “The baby, Perry. What happened to the baby? You were her friend. You must know.”
The golden boy sagged. Once more Eddie had touched a sensitive spot. “She wouldn’t tell me. I wanted to help. She wouldn’t let me. She said it was her problem, not mine. When her delivery got close, she went off somewhere with Sharon. The next day Sharon came back by herself. And Junie—well, Junie got back a week or so later, and she didn’t have a baby with her.”
Eddie pondered. His sister gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the baby’s whereabouts from the few people who knew she was pregnant—from Benjamin Mellor, the father; from Perry Mount, who wanted to marry her; from the brother who loved her most of all. And there was something else. Mellor had called the baby “it.” Perry never referred to the baby’s sex. Eddie wondered whether he himself might be the only one Junie had told that the baby was a girl.
Perry, meanwhile, had resumed his hectoring tone.
“It’s time to stop, Eddie. Stop searching. Stop turning over rocks. You don’t have any idea what trouble you’re causing. You don’t understand Harlem. Harlem has secrets. Secrets it won’t yield without a fight. Harlem isn’t a neighborhood, Eddie. It’s an idea. You might even call it an ideology. A force. You can’t mess around with it. It has a habit of messing back.”
“The cross,” Eddie breathed. “All of this is about the cross. The big speech. Warning me off of the search. It’s not about Junie. It’s about that stupid upside-down cross.” Perry said nothing. “What is it, Perry? What does it mean? What are you afraid I’m going to uncover?” Another thought struck him. “Do you have one, too?”
To his surprise, Perry smiled, almost sheepishly. He looked, again, like the adolescent who had wooed Junie and never won her. “Maybe you’ll find her after all,” he said, tone gentler, even consoling. “If you find your sister, you should
ask her. Otherwise”—the hard-faced golden boy was back—“otherwise, you need to get your nose out of things that aren’t your business.”
“Things like what?”
“I have a lot of respect for you, Eddie. A lot of respect. You’re going to be a major talent.” From royalty, crumbs for the commoner. “But let me tell you what my father always used to say. The Caucasians have no idea what we’re capable of. No idea. And you know something? Half the time, neither do we.” A sharp nod. “Well, you’ll see, Eddie. Stay out of our way, and you’ll see. One day, we’ll shake the throne, and then the whole world will know.”
“Shake what throne? Perry—”
But the golden boy was striding angrily away. It would be more than a decade before Eddie laid eyes on him again.
CHAPTER 23
Pink Gin
(I)
“HARLEM HAS SECRETS,” said Langston Hughes with a smile. “Well, well. They’ll be inventing steam next.”
Eddie smiled back, but uncertainly. They were in a taxi, bumping their way along the expressway toward Idlewild Airport. Langston was heading to Paris, to oversee the opening of one of his plays. He had invited Eddie to join him, on the ground that the trip would do the young man good, but Eddie preferred to stay and keep looking. So they settled for the cab ride.
“He really said that?” Hughes asked. “About shaking the throne?”
“And that after they shook the throne the whole world would know.”
The great man shook his heavy head. He glanced at his watch. “His father used to use that phrase a lot. Burton. Usually in the context of daring greatly, the way the old Leninists used to talk about shocking the bourgeoisie. Your friend Perry is up to something.”
“I figured that part out for myself,” said Eddie. “And he isn’t my friend.”
Hughes ignored this. “Your friend Perry has had a difficult life. Never had many friends. His mother was this cold, distant Czarina, and in any case died when Perry was still young. And nothing the boy did was ever enough for Burton. I’m told the boy adored his Aunt Sumner when he was little, but she passed into whiteness and disappeared, oh, twenty years ago. More. So Burton was all the family Perry had. Then the car crash last year, and Perry was alone. And of course Burton would have raised him on those wild theories—the darker nation as a force, conspiracies, shaking the throne, all the claptrap your friend threw at you.” He fell silent. Eddie watched the gray city go by. “I know what you’re thinking, Eddie. Maybe Burton decided to put his theories into action. Maybe this is the Project Phil Castle wanted to warn me about.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t work, Eddie. It doesn’t hold together. Castle was white, and no sort of liberal. Not even a spellbinder like Burton Mount would be able to tempt him into a conspiracy aimed at elevating our community. Besides, Burton was a lot of things, not all of them attractive, but he was no killer.”
“Killer?”
“Well, Phil Castle was murdered, wasn’t he? And that’s not the sort of thing Burton Mount would have put up with. He talked a good game, Eddie, but he was an armchair radical all the way.”
Traffic had slowed. They had reached the long turnaround for the airport. Hughes was patting his pockets. Eddie reminded him that he would be keeping the taxi.
The men stood beside the car as the bags were unloaded. Hughes, only half joking, warned Eddie not to do anything foolish while he was away. They shared an awkward hug. Riding back to Harlem, Eddie reflected on the great man’s analysis, and spotted the flaw. The late Burton Mount, Langston had insisted, was no killer. That was why whatever Perry was up to could not be the same as the Project that had spooked Philmont Castle. But that theory made an assumption that was not necessarily true.
Burton Mount might not have been in charge.
(II)
LATER THAT NIGHT, Eddie attended a meeting of a political circle of which he had recently become a member, but the subject of that evening’s lecture—the possible consequences for the price of securities should the United States ever abandon Bretton Woods and delink the dollar from the gold standard—was sufficiently abstruse, not to mention absurd, that he was glad he had warned them in advance that he would be departing early. He took the subway down to a gallery in the Village, where one of Gary’s friends was opening an exhibit. For once Gary had no girl on his arm. Eddie knew that his friend remained stuck on Mona, but had heard no details. Gary said a quick hello, then was lost in the throng. Eddie wandered the exhibit. Actually, he had little experience of the fine arts, and the paintings, over which everyone oohed and aahed, seemed to him mostly gaudy slashes of one color against a background of another. He heard people praising the particularism of this one and the subversive integrity of that one, but dismissing a third as derivative in its pretensions, and he wondered whether they got together to vote on the jargon first or just made it up as they went along. He slipped away to the bar but settled for a club soda. A voice beside him said, “And a pink gin fizz. With Kirschwasser. Put it on his tab.”
Eddie turned in delight.
Aurelia touched his hand, down where nobody could see. “Hello, darling,” she said. He opened his mouth to answer, but Aurie shook her head. She handed him a note, and was gone.
(III)
TWO NIGHTS LATER, as the note instructed, he stopped at the corner of 145th and Edgecombe in a gypsy cab, borrowed from a bemused Lenny Rouse. Aurelia scrambled into the back seat and gave him the address of a girlfriend’s new place in Brooklyn. After a moment, he realized that she was serious.
“You stay on your side and I’ll stay on my side and everything will be fine,” Aurelia said.
“That makes me your chauffeur.”
“And it makes me your responsibility. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”
They drove for several minutes in silence. He glanced at her often in the mirror, but she did not glance back. She had taken up smoking again, and made it through two cigarettes before he decided to speak first.
“I’m sorry about before, Aurie. I really am. I wasn’t myself, but that’s no excuse. I had no right to talk to you that way. Forgive me?”
She smiled at him in the mirror. “We’ve known each other a very long time, Eddie. How many times would you say you’ve apologized to me? I mean, really, sincerely, apologized?”
“Fifty? A hundred?”
“I think this makes three.” She looked out the window. She seemed quite content. “And how many times have I apologized to you?”
He took the bait. “Three?”
“Closer to zero. I don’t do apologies.”
“Oh.” It was a Wednesday, and late-night traffic was light. They had already reached midtown. “What do you do?”
“Evidently, I do your detective work.”
“My detective work?”
“Tell me about this cross of yours, darling. Where did you see it?”
Eddie was not sure how to explain. “Ah, I saw a woman wearing one on her necklace. A white woman.”
“And that made you decide to investigate further? Or did you just want to investigate her?”
“I saw another one. The circumstances—well, I shouldn’t say.”
“That fits.” She was looking out the window. “The cross is a secret, sacred symbol of a silly little Harlem men’s club. They’ve got a hundred of them.”
“Symbols?”
“Men’s clubs, silly. Every year somebody founds a new one, every one is more exclusive than the next—you know how it goes. The password, the secret handshake, the loyalty till death or till you stop paying your dues. You’re probably a member of three or four yourself, except you’re not allowed to say. Kevin’s in Empyreals, darling. Heard of them?”
He frowned. “They’re not the most prestigious.”
“Or the most exclusive or the richest or the oldest. They’re not the most anything.”
“So, the cross is a dead end.”
She shrugged, crossed her legs, saw his eyes in the mirror, adjusted her skirt
. Downward. “Or else the cross means something else, too.”
“Do you happen to know if Perry Mount is an Empyreal?”
“The members aren’t allowed to name the other members, darling. Not to outsiders, especially wives.” The car lurched to a halt. Aurelia peered at the vast sea of brake lights ahead in the darkness. She pointed. “Don’t go that way; turn left, then go down Third.” She waited to make sure her instructions were followed, then relaxed. “You saw the cross around a white girl’s neck, darling. Harlem men’s clubs don’t actually admit white girls as members. I don’t know if you were aware of that.” She laughed. He didn’t. “And don’t go thinking that some paramour gave it to her. The men in these clubs take them too seriously for that.”
“If you’re so smart, you explain it.”
“I can’t yet. But I will.” Pointing at the sign. “See? You listened to me, and you’re already at the bridge.”
“It’s a couple of blocks yet.”
“Well, hurry, driver, Anita is expecting me.”
Eddie’s eyes met hers in the mirror. “I was hoping you were going to tell me the house was empty.”
“Don’t be silly, darling. I’m an upstanding member of society. They even put me in the Garden Club, did you know that?”—no Harlem women’s group being more difficult to crack. “You’re good at this driving business, Eddie, darling. You should try it, if the writing doesn’t work out.”
“I’ll remember that.”
More silence. Eddie felt teased, which he hated, and used, which he hated more. They crossed the bridge. Aurelia gave more directions. Eddie followed them woodenly. They made several turns, and then Aurelia told him to stop. They were on a pretty side street of row houses, less ostentatious than anything in Sugar Hill, but clean and attractive all the same.
“Is this part of the darker nation?” he asked.
Aurelia chuckled. “What you mean is, is this neighborhood segregated?” She touched his shoulder. “Mostly West Indians, a few Italians, Jews.” She had her purse open. “Look around, Eddie. This is the future.”
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