Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “Then it’s Junie. You know where she is.”

  “No.”

  Another shot: “You’ve heard from her, though.”

  A long silence. Then Mellor slipped a hand into his tweeds and drew out a handwritten note. “This was left in my mailbox at Langdell.”

  Dear Professor M—

  Thanks for everything. You’re a good man.

  —J

  Eddie studied the single page, the handful of words in the script he knew so well, shaky, as if written in a vehicle, on plain white notebook filler paper. And his first, odd impulse was jealousy, that his sister, from wherever she was hiding, had written this man, and not her big brother. His second was a flood of relief at this hard evidence, the first since that photo of the battle in Maxton, that his sister was still alive. His third was confusion over why Junie would risk this delivery, by whatever means, to thank the man who had seduced, impregnated, and abandoned her. And his fourth was—

  The Junie you thought you knew was not the only Junie. Perry Mount.

  “When did she leave this?” Eddie demanded, waving the paper around. “Did you see her?”

  Mellor shook his head. “I haven’t seen her, Mr. Wesley. I haven’t spoken with her. She left the note three or four months ago. I came back from class, and there it was. And, no, Mr. Wesley, nobody noticed whoever dropped it off.”

  Eddie looked away, across the sloping lawn down to the water. A year and a half ago, his sister was in Maxton. Before that, Nashville. This past spring, Cambridge. She relied on others, and broke cover at least once, to risk leaving a cryptic note. But not for her brother.

  “Why are you showing this to me?” Eddie asked. He felt his anger dulling. “Why did you bring it here? Why didn’t you burn it? Or give it to the FBI?”

  “You’re welcome to keep it,” said the professor, coldly.

  “Me?”

  “I don’t want it. I can’t have it on my person, obviously. Not with my…career plans.”

  My career plans. Eddie’s bewilderment grew. The Justice Department. The federal bench. Eddie could imagine the world ten or twelve years on, if the professor realized his dreams: Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Mellor. “I still don’t understand. All this trouble to get the note to me? It doesn’t make sense. Given your career plans, as you call them—well, I still don’t understand why you didn’t burn it.”

  Mellor was on his feet. “Maybe I’m not the man you think I am.”

  Fat chance. Again Eddie rattled the page. “Why is she thanking you? What did you ever do for my sister besides get her in trouble?”

  Again Ben Mellor climbed up on his dignity. His tone was oracular and final, as befitted a future Supreme Court justice. “I should think that would be obvious to a man of your intelligence, Mr. Wesley.”

  He strode off toward the house.

  CHAPTER 27

  Another Side

  (I)

  AS FOR AURELIA, she had married into a staunchly Republican family. Matty Garland raised money for Nixon, and called him not “Mr. Vice President” but “Dick.” Matty gave a fancy dinner for Nixon at his eight-bedroom home on the Hudson near Dobbs Ferry. Through the dining-room windows you could see the river, sparkling gold wherever the moonlight touched it. Most of the guests were white. Matty seated Aurelia beside the candidate. She honored Matty’s faith by turning on the charm. Kevin beamed at her across the table. Richard Nixon was not known to be drawn to women other than his wife, but Aurie kept him smiling. By the end of the meal, she, too, had secured Dick privileges.

  Later, Aurelia wrote up the dinner for her column. Kevin had persuaded his father to purchase the Seventh Avenue Sentinel, less to give his wife a place to work than to provide a Republican voice in an increasingly Democratic Negro community. The new Sentinel trumpeted what it called Nixon’s activism on behalf of civil rights, especially his determined efforts, in cooperation with Martin Luther King, Jr., to persuade the Republican Party to support the Voting Rights Act that topped the demands of the Negro leadership—a bill on which the Democratic Congress was unwilling to act.

  The newspaper neglected to mention that Nixon failed.

  In early 1960, Aurelia’s daughter, Zora, was going on four. Her son, Locke, was nearly two. The family lived in a large Tudor-style house on a leafy lot in Mount Vernon, a short drive or train ride from the city. Of course, most of their neighbors were white, but the number of middle-class black families in the suburbs was on the rise. Actually, the Garlands had fought their way through several real-estate agents before finding a woman willing to show them houses fitting their station. Another major goal of the civil-rights leaders was an open-housing law, but the Southern Democrats who ran the Senate—so Kevin insisted—feared the prospect of Negro neighbors even more than they did the prospect of Negro voters.

  The house was beautiful, but Aurelia was lonely. Though her husband no longer traveled quite so frenetically, he spent long hours at the office. Her girlfriends were scattered. Mona Veazie was studying at the University of Chicago and, from hints she dropped in her letters, had found herself a man. Claire Garland had moved with her family to Long Island. Sherilyn DeForde had moved with hers to New Jersey. Torie Elden, still single, had moved to Washington. Everybody was leaving Harlem, but not for the same places. Sometimes Aurelia would take the train into town and stay for a night or two at the apartment the Garlands still maintained on Edgecombe Avenue. She would visit the salons and find them ill-attended, and desultory. Harlem society seemed to be dying, and so swiftly she could hardly figure out how or why.

  Matty dropped by the house often, seeming to sense that his daughter-in-law needed bucking up. He would compliment her on a new hairstyle when Kevin forgot, and somehow knew exactly when a box of imported chocolates would come in handy. They would sit in the kitchen, with its gleaming white appliances, and Aurie would listen while Matty talked politics or movies or weather, anything at all to fill the empty spaces. He rarely left without reminding her that she was meant for great things and dared not settle for less.

  Kevin’s mother, Wanda, who had never quite made her peace with the marriage, came by less often.

  Aurelia befriended some of her neighbors. Next door lived a happy couple named Finnerty, with children of ten, six, and four. Neil Finnerty worked on Madison Avenue. His wife, Callie, was a homemaker, thickset, and blond from a bottle. All she talked about was motherhood. Whenever Aurelia tried to change the subject, Callie changed it back. They walked their children together. Locke still rode in the carriage, until he clambered out to keep up with the Finnerty kids. Callie taught Aurelia to bake pies, which the nuns never had, and persuaded her to hang a clothesline in the backyard instead of using the modern Westinghouse dryer her husband had bought. But Kevin decreed the billowing sheets an eyesore and made her take them down. Callie introduced her to the merchants downtown, and in New Rochelle, at the fancy places on North Avenue and the cheaper stores on Webster. The proprietors, chilly at first, warmed up fast when they realized how much money she was prepared to spend. Another time, Callie took Aurelia to meet her friends at the country club, but none would sit at their table. Callie was mortified. Aurie told her not to worry about it. After that, the two did not talk quite as much, except to call polite hellos as they passed in their adjoining yards, until the sultry August Sunday when a chastened Callie rang the Garland bell around seven in the evening and reported that the FBI had been asking questions about them.

  Aurelia invited her in.

  Kevin was out of town, Locke was asleep, and the maid was on the screened porch with Zora, playing Candyland. Aurelia and Callie sat in the kitchen sipping coffee despite the hour and the heat, because Aurelia remained a little confused about suburban proprieties.

  “There were two of them,” said Callie. “They made me promise not to tell, but you’re my friend. It’s not a crime to tell my friend, is it?”

  Aurie calmed her down, and eventually the story came out. Two agents, as she said. Two mornings
ago: Callie had been dithering ever since. At first they just asked how the Garlands were settling in, what kind of people they seemed to be—“I told them how nice you are”—and then they asked about any evidence that the couple was involved in any kind of radical activities.

  “I laughed, Aurie. I really, truly did. I told them, Aurie’s not a radical. Aurie’s my friend. She’s a loyal American. That’s what I told them. Only they didn’t want to talk about you. They wanted to talk about Kevin.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  She cast her eyes toward the sparkling linoleum floor. “I said I don’t know him very well.”

  Aurie was disheartened by the suspicion in her neighbor’s voice. True, Kevin made little effort to be friendly, but that kind of tepid answer was likely to reinforce the Bureau’s conviction that—

  Well, she did not know precisely what the FBI suspected, but she did know that nobody would ever suspect her husband of Communist sympathies. So it had to be something else. She cooed and reassured and hugged, told poor Callie there was nothing to worry about, it was all a big mistake, and sent her home. Sitting up in bed that night, watching Ed Sullivan, Aurie thought back. She remembered Kevin’s mad search for Castle’s testament. She wondered if he had ever tracked it down. Certainly he seemed to have stopped looking for it. But mostly she wondered whether the federal government knew about her husband’s search, and was suddenly looking for the same thing.

  (II)

  ON MONDAY, she decided to call Eddie. He was traveling with the campaign. By this time, Eddie was doing well enough to employ an assistant, a bespectacled woman of perhaps twenty who worked for him while taking courses at the New School. Her name was Paula, she was white and of some peculiar ethnicity, and in Harlem nobody trusted her. She spent a lot of time in Eddie’s apartment, supposedly working on his correspondence and typing his manuscripts, but the Czarinas conjectured the obvious. In her worst moments, so did Aurelia. She had met Paula only once, and found her hero-worshiping of the boss frankly lustful.

  “I think they’re in Oregon,” Paula told her.

  “You think?”

  “Maybe Washington. The state, not the city,” she added, in case Aurie turned out to be a dunce.

  “Do you have a way to reach him?”

  “I have a schedule somewhere. Sometimes he calls in for messages. Long-distance.” Awe in her voice, perhaps thinking of the expense.

  “Will you tell him I need to reach him?”

  “If I remember.”

  “You could write it down.”

  “I’d only lose it.”

  When Aurelia hung up, she was ready to scream, but it was time to pull dinner together, an act that always calmed her. To her surprise, Eddie telephoned that very night.

  “The FBI was asking about Kevin,” she said without preamble.

  “Then they’re probably listening to us now.”

  This possibility Aurie had not considered. There were times when a mild paranoia like Eddie’s could be considered a virtue.

  “Do you know what this is about?” she asked.

  “No. But I suspect that your husband possesses the necessary contacts to find out.”

  The chill in his voice told Aurelia he still loved her, but it also scared her even more than Callie’s news.

  (III)

  KEVIN RETURNED to Mount Vernon late the following night. She expected him to be furious, but he took the news calmly. They sat across from each other in the living room. The only sign that her husband was disturbed was his decision to drink a third Scotch.

  “It’s not worth worrying about,” he finally said.

  “Honey, it’s the FBI.”

  “I’ll call Dad. Dad will call Dick, Dick will call Hoover—there’s a way these things work. People like us don’t get investigated.” He drank. “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “And I don’t want you to go to jail.”

  His smile was wan, and self-deprecating. “Is my wife saying that she loves me after all?”

  This shook her. “I never said I didn’t love you—”

  “And you never said you did.” He crossed to the sideboard, picked up the bottle, then put it down. He set the glass next to it. “Never mind. Look. There’s really nothing to worry about. If anything ever happens to me—anything at all—you and the children will be well provided for.” His back was turned to her. “Very well provided for.”

  “That’s not what I’m worrying about—”

  “I got Dad to buy you a newspaper. Don’t forget that. I’ve never denied you anything.”

  “Kevin, please! What’s the matter with you?”

  He turned around, folding his arms. The delicate face remained placid. “You called Eddie. You told him before you told me.”

  Aurelia was too stunned to speak.

  “That stupid little assistant of his can’t keep a secret to save her life. I’ll bet half of Harlem knows. Unfortunately, it’s our half.”

  Our half. She remembered one of Matty’s lessons: I’m a conservative because I trust people more than government. Kevin’s a conservative because he thinks he’s better than other people. His kind seems more popular than my kind these days.

  “I—I thought he could help—”

  He rode right over her. “The truth is, you wish you’d married Eddie instead of me.”

  “Kevin, I do not!”

  “Except for the money, you’d have married him.”

  “That’s not true!” She was on her feet but dared not close the distance. “Why would you say that? I’m with you because I want to be.”

  “You certainly have a peculiar way of showing it.”

  “I told you. I was trying to help.”

  He nodded, less in agreement than in acceptance. “Never mind, honey. Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

  Their lovemaking was desperate, at least on her side. Aurelia did not know which of them she was trying to persuade. She only knew that the convulsive physicality between them was the single means of persuasion left. Afterward, she clung to her husband, whispering whatever words of reassurance she could think of. That she had no regrets. That she didn’t care about the money. That she would never betray him. That she respected him and supported him.

  But she never said she loved him, and they both knew it.

  (IV)

  KENNEDY WON THE ELECTION, the closest in decades. To the Garlands, it was a matter of faith that the candidate’s father had bought votes for him, especially in Chicago. Aurelia did not know what to believe. She was surprised at how little she cared. She cared about her children, and saving her marriage. Callie had voted for Kennedy, and burbled for days. Aurelia had voted for Nixon, but only because he had been so sweet at Matty’s dinner.

  A week after the election, she and Kevin ran into Eddie at Amaretta Veazie’s salon. Possibly this was error: every hostess in Harlem knew better than to invite the three on the same evening. Or maybe it was just Amaretta being mischievous, because she could from time to time break just as many rules as her daughter, Mona. Still, on this particular night, everything at first was fine. Eddie announced to the group his pending move to Washington in January with the new Administration. He would still write, but he would also be working half-time as second man in the White House office of speechwriting. People clapped him on the back. Eddie grinned. Kevin, watching events, said it might be nice just once to have a President who wrote his own speeches. And his own books, Kevin added. Eddie leaped to his man’s defense, but Amaretta, with difficulty, changed the subject. Aurelia walked into another room. Amaretta owned a famous collection of mirrors. Aurie seated herself beside an antique cheval and stared at her reflection, wishing she and the Aurelia beyond the glass could change places for a while. Chamonix Bing sat down next to Aurie. Since Sherilyn’s move to New Jersey, Chammie was the principal gossip in their set.

  “Heard the latest?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Chammie began, and was off.

  Ther
e was a rumor, she said, that Mona was pregnant, and not married—thus her mother’s despair. Aurie did not reply. She had recently made a trip to Cleveland, to visit the nuns who had raised her, followed by several days in Chicago. Mona wanted to come back east, but not to Harlem. Together, the two women had plotted strategy. The move would be tricky, and Aurie was not about to share her best friend’s secrets. Chammie went on to other gossip, some of it involving Eddie and Torie Elden, who had also worked on the Kennedy campaign. Aurelia offered the haughtiest smile she could manage, and murmured the proper responses by rote.

  “Torie always did have a thing for him. I’m surprised she’s not here tonight, the hussy, holding on to him for dear life.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm.”

  Chammie continued talking, and Aurie stopped listening. She was a married woman, she told herself. She must not think what she was thinking. She closed her eyes and tried to dream of Kevin’s best smile, annoyed that she kept seeing Eddie’s.

  Her husband’s cry brought Aurelia back to an awareness of her surroundings.

  She rushed back to the drawing room, certain she would find the two men wrestling. A grinning Chammie Bing, obviously hoping for exactly that, was at her heels.

  Kevin was standing in the middle of the room, swaying on his feet. Eddie was one of several people crowded close. Kevin was sobbing. His cousin Oliver was holding him. Aurelia was certain Oliver had not been present when she left the room fifteen minutes ago. She took her husband in her arms, but Kevin could not speak. Oliver had to tell Aurie the news.

  Matty Garland was dead.

  “His heart?” she gasped, remembering his weight.

  Not his heart, and, as it turned out, not natural causes of any kind.

  The body of Matthew Garland, who had missed a dinner engagement with potential investors, had been discovered in a Queens motel, not far from the airport. He had been knifed, multiple times. The motel was known to be frequented by prostitutes.

  Over the next few days, piecing together the story from witnesses who heard through the thin walls, the detectives concluded that the Negro in question had refused to pay for services rendered, taken a swing at the pimp, and gotten the worse end of the deal. Several of the girls identified the victim as a regular. The police put out a net for a few known characters and caught nobody.