But Eddie, as usual, put accomplishment behind him. The novel was old news. Now he was worried about the Nixon story. How could it be that he was seeing what everyone was missing? The day after his return from California, Eddie went sailing on the Chesapeake Bay with Gary Fatek. The weather was atrocious, but this time Eddie was properly dressed for it.
“There’s something wrong with the way the story is being covered,” he told Gary, shouting as waves battered the sloop. “People are missing Nixon’s tragedy. The pathos.”
“Erebeth loves him,” Gary shouted back. “She still thinks the Commies are hiding under the bed.”
“What I’m saying is, there’s an angle here we’re overlooking. We all say we hate Nixon so much. Ambitious schemer, no principles, anything to win.”
“Sounds right.”
“But isn’t that all of us?” Eddie shouted. Gary looked at him. “Doesn’t Nixon somehow represent America? We’re a nation of winners.” A wave drenched him. “We want leaders who win, and we don’t care how they do it.”
Gary handed him a rope from somewhere, told him to hold it, stepped over Eddie’s arm, took it back. The sail jumped, then filled afresh. Gary told Eddie to tie down the line, and Eddie remembered, more or less, how to do it.
“This isn’t about Nixon, is it?” said Gary. On their new tack, the noise was suddenly less. “It’s about Aurelia.”
Eddie looked up. “Aurelia?”
“Sure. She’s a Nixon fan, right? A big one. Her father-in-law was a Nixon backer, so is her husband, and Aurie thinks the world of him. That’s why you can’t see him as a monster, Eddie. Because it would betray Aurie.”
“Then why didn’t I support Nixon to begin with?”
“Maybe a rivalry with Kevin. I don’t know.”
“Come on, Gary. You can’t have it both ways!”
But the smile on his old friend’s face suggested that Gary did not care which way he had it, as long as he got under Eddie’s skin. Over the past year or two, the old friends had more and more gotten on each other’s nerves. Gary had withdrawn from his former life. Eddie no longer had any idea how his classmate spent his time, and Gary never volunteered.
“Write the essay the way you want,” said Gary as they scudded toward shore. “Just be ready for the firestorm.”
And a firestorm there was. The essay ran to sixteen hundred words. The Nation titled it “Dick Nixon, All-American.” Angry mail poured in from the right, where, interestingly, Eddie’s point came across with crystal clarity: by arguing that Nixon embodied the American character, he was insulting Americans, not complimenting Nixon. But the magazine’s readership was mostly on the left, and nearly everybody seemed to interpret Eddie’s words the other way around: he was pro-Nixon!
Soon people who had never read the essay—and never heard of Eddie—were absolutely certain they understood his argument. And, mostly, they hated his argument, and therefore, in keeping with American tradition, hated him, too. Thus was Edward Wesley Junior labeled, for the next period of his career, a conservative. There was even an abortive move to take back his National Book Award.
“It’s not so bad,” said Aurelia, when Eddie ran into her at the opening of an art exhibition in New York just after Christmas. She was alone, looking tall and beautiful and utterly devoted to her husband. “They’ve been calling Kevin a conservative for years.”
“Kevin is a conservative.”
“Well, yes. But the way they say it, they make it sound so dirty.” Aurie brightened. “Speaking of Kevin, he’s so proud of Kennedy now. The way he faced down Khrushchev and made him take those missiles out of Cuba. Personally, I was scared to death. I thought we were about to have World War III. But Kevin loved it. He even says he might support a Democrat next time around.”
“Wonderful,” said Eddie, forcing a smile.
Afterward he helped her find a taxi. He was too savvy to offer to share.
“I’m sorry about you and Torie,” she said, standing by the open door. “You would have been a great match.”
“That was over months ago.”
“The grapevine’s a lot slower than it used to be.” A cheery smile. “So—who’s special now? In your life, I mean?”
“I’m too busy for romance,” he said, the line he always used, usually when fending women off.
“Silly man,” she said, and touched his cheek with her gloved hand. “You need to find yourself a silly woman and settle down.”
He watched the cab drive away. He saw Aurelia dip her face into her hands, but she probably had something in her eye.
(II)
EDDIE WAS A MAN of two cities now. Despite his departure from the Kennedy Administration, he had kept the house on I Street, unwilling to be separated too far from the President he so admired. But he had never surrendered the apartment on Convent Avenue, and stayed there on his frequent visits to New York. After seeing Aurelia off, however, he did not return to Harlem at once. He had a man to see, a source he had known from the beginning he would need.
He took the train to Brooklyn, where he knocked on the door of a basement apartment in a dank, crumbling building near Eastern Parkway. Derek Garland answered the door. There were three rooms, all cluttered with books. The two men sat at the battered table sipping a Russian vodka so bland you could almost taste the potatoes. Derek was a Harlem legend. He was also a madman. His face was suspicious and sweaty. He lived this way because he had trouble holding a job, and he had trouble holding a job because his politics kept landing him in front of congressional committees, or in jail. He refused as a matter of ideological conviction to accept his family’s offers of assistance, offers that lately came less and less frequently. He had announced for the last several years his impending move to Ghana but had yet to show the gumption to do it. Nobody Eddie knew lived closer to America’s radical fringe, and it was to the radical fringe that Eddie, from the moment he received the photograph of Junie toting a rifle, had known he would sooner or later have to go.
Eddie began with the truth. It was he who had turned in Emil Goldfus, also known as Rudolf Abel, whom Derek had brought to Aurelia’s wedding seven years ago. He had protected Derek himself out of loyalty to the cause: he knew Derek liked that sort of talk. Now he was asking to be paid back. He had to get in touch with Jewel Agony. Anticipating Derek’s response, he hastened to add that this had nothing to do with turning anybody in. His reasons, he said, were personal. All the while, Derek poured and drank and stared.
“This is about your sister,” Derek said once he heard Eddie out.
“Yes.”
“I can’t help you.” He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Those people are crazy.”
“What people?”
Derek Garland had a way of opening his hazel eyes very wide behind the thick glasses while he took time to think. The goggling look made him seem stupid, but Eddie knew he was very much the opposite. Behind that strange face was a stranger brain. He had been the many-time chess champion of the Metropolitan, the private Negro social club in Sugar Hill, before denouncing the venue as a petit-bourgeois distraction. His ascetic face wore permanent bruises, and his movements were jerky. People said he had never been the same since nearly dying in a Southern jail; and only a madman would have returned for more, as Derek Garland regularly did.
“The thing about these Agony types,” said Derek calmly, as if he had not been staring into space for the past few minutes, “is that they’ll shoot you. Shoot you with a gun,” he added, in case Eddie had been worried about artillery fire.
“They won’t shoot me,” said Eddie.
“Anyway, I don’t know any of them.”
“But you know who to ask.”
A pause. “Maybe.” His eyes leaped at something on the far wall, and Eddie turned to look but saw only shadows and, through the window, passing headlights. “I’m moving to Ghana,” Derek continued in the same even tone as before. “Or Moscow. First, though, I’m getting married.”
Eddie trie
d to catch his gaze for a congratulatory smile. “Who’s the lucky lady?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to find one.” His tone was perfectly serious.
“Well, I wish you well.”
“I wish you well, too. But be careful, lest you get cast into the fiery pit.” An unexpected burst of laughter. He laughed for a very long time, hands over his ample stomach, rocking in his tottering chair. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he was calm again. “Not that the fiery pit is so bad. I hear the people who live down there are always dreaming big dreams. Not that I believe in God myself. Or is it God who doesn’t believe in me?” He frowned, nibbling at his scarred lip, and seemed genuinely to be trying to work this one out. “Funny thing about God. He only shows up in churches. He’s never around when they’re feeding His people to the lions.”
“I’ve often had the same thought,” said Eddie, very surprised.
“Then you’re a damned fool,” retorted Derek, with satisfaction.
“I’m sorry?”
“You think God isn’t watching?” Voice rolling like Wesley Senior’s. “You think God doesn’t know? You think—” Just like that, Derek was calm again. “Tell you something about your Agony friends. They’re not afraid of the lions or the hellfire. Martyr complex. Your sister probably has one, too.”
“I doubt that very much,” said Eddie, indignantly. But he wondered.
Derek was not even interested. “Listen. Met somebody in jail years ago. In there for the same thing as me, telling the HUAC fascists to go to Hell and take their committee with them. Man had this idea. Group like that. Raise some money, build them a camp somewhere. Train them. Start shooting things up, scaring people. Scare them enough, he said, and they’d do the right thing. Stupid. He wanted educated people only. College degrees. So they could see further than the huddled masses, et cetera. Serious ideological error, Eddie. Hadn’t read his Lenin, obviously.”
“What was the name?”
“Didn’t have a name back then”—Eddie realized that Derek was talking about the group the man wanted to form, not the man himself—“but he wanted to get the Negroes involved. Prominent Negroes. White man. Professor of something.”
“Professor where? And what was his name?”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s dead now.”
“But what—”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Derek said. “I don’t know those Agony people, but, if you have a martyr complex, too? Want to get yourself shot?—I’ll see what I can do.” He was escorting Eddie to the door. “Don’t call me. Don’t use your home phone. Not for any purpose. It’s not a tap you should be worried about. They put bombs in phones these days—”
And, just like that, Eddie was out on the street.
Maybe he had put out a feeler. Maybe he had visited the asylum.
And maybe he had done both.
A quick trip two days later to the Library of Congress confirmed what he already suspected: when Derek Garland and Alphaeus Hunton and Dashiell Hammett and Frederick Vanderbilt Field had all gone to prison in the early fifties for refusing to turn over the lists of those who had contributed to their defense fund, one of their fellow resisters, now deceased, had been a retired Harvard professor named Hamilton Mellor, whose son, Benjamin, had succeeded his father on the law faculty, and confessed to fathering Junie’s baby.
The next morning, Eddie sat in a booth in the basement of the fortresslike Riggs Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the Treasury Department. Here, in a safe-deposit box, he kept the most important records from his search. He opened the appropriate folder and slipped in the jottings from his trip to the Library of Congress. Before putting the file away, he glanced for perhaps the thousandth time at a peculiar note his sister had left up at Harvard Law School: Thanks for everything. You’re a good man.
Eddie returned Junie’s note to its place. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he withdrew for another look a two-month-old news clipping from the front page of the Boston Globe about the tragic loss off Cape Cod of Professor Benjamin Mellor when his boat capsized in a storm.
CHAPTER 31
Attica
(I)
IN JANUARY of 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as governor of Alabama. Addressing the cheering throng at the State Capitol, he promised to get rid of the state’s liquor agents, improve education, and bring in new jobs. He then went on to his main subject, promising to “toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,” and adding “Segregation now!…Segregation tomorrow!…Segregation forever!” In the salons of the darker nation, everyone thought the sky was falling. In March, Eddie published another essay in The Nation, quoting the part of Wallace’s speech the press had omitted. The governor, he pointed out, had drawn attention to the hypocrisy of liberals who “fawn” over school integration but live in segregated neighborhoods. Eddie, whose view of his country still glimmered but was growing grimmer, had a different take. Wallace had not identified hypocrisy. He had identified humanity. None of us lived up to our ideals, he wrote, remembering another of his father’s sermons. The hypocrite was not the man who failed. The hypocrite was the man who did not believe he was required to try.
“So are we liberals hypocrites or not?” demanded a young man he met at a party in Georgetown, a rather decrepit neighborhood that had become fashionable after the Kennedys moved in during the 1950s. “What are you saying?”
“That’s not the point of the story,” said Eddie.
But innocence dies nearly as hard as ignorance. “I’m for all kinds of integration,” the man insisted. “Education, housing, you name it.”
“Is that your wife over there?”
“Yes.”
“And how many Negro women did you date before you married a white one?”
This was an unfair shot, and Eddie knew it, but he was angry at most of the world just now. The man stalked away. Somebody else came over with a question about the gangster novel. Eddie felt hemmed in. As it happened, he was attending the party with Torie Elden. They had managed to remain friends. They had set boundaries. Sometimes Torie told him stories about the men she dated, but most of the stories made her cry. More people crowded him. He was notorious. They all wanted to be able to say that they had talked to him. Eddie had never liked crowds. He told Torie they were going. As usual, he drove her to her apartment on Capitol Hill. As usual, she invited him in for coffee. He usually declined, but tonight he accepted. He woke around midnight and realized the scope of his error. He slipped out of bed and collected his things. Torie told him to be careful driving home in the snow. Evidently the blond man had expected Eddie to stay with her all night, because when Eddie got home his occasional watcher was ransacking the place. He ducked Eddie’s wild swing and put him on the floor with a single punch. It was like being punched by an anvil. When the stars cleared, Eddie was alone.
A careful search disclosed nothing missing. Either the search had been interrupted too early, or the blond man had decided that what he sought was not there.
The police report was a formality. He filed it only because not filing would seem suspicious. Alas, he told the officers, he could not offer a description. He had not seen the man’s face. Not in any detail. He remembered only the blond hair.
They told him he should get himself a dog, the way things were these days.
Almost everything Eddie had told the police was true. He had not seen the man’s face. He did not think he would know the intruder if he saw him again. What Eddie had omitted to tell them was that he now remembered where he had seen the blond man before.
(II)
THE VISITING ROOM of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York was painted a bright yellow-green and apparently whitewashed regularly by trusties, because, aside from the indelible stink of the sweat of powerful but frustrated men, it lacked the grimy prison smells he expected. Eddie sat on a folding chair, watching the empty space on the other side of the shatterproof glass. It was an April morning of delicate loveliness. T
hree days ago, Martin Luther King and his associates had been jailed for contempt when they defied a court order forbidding them to march in Birmingham on Easter Sunday. Six different magazines had asked Eddie to go down and cover the story. But it had taken him weeks to arrange this meeting, and he was not going to miss it.
On the way to Attica, he had stopped in Manhattan, spending several nights at Convent Avenue, for the benefit of anyone who might be, at this late date, still dogging his steps. He found Harlem increasingly sad. Not depressing—merely sad. The salons were mostly gone. The Czarinas had scattered. Shirley Elden was dead. Enid Garland was sick, and had moved to midtown. Amaretta Veazie still held forth from her townhouse on Edgecombe Avenue, but word had it that Mona, who lived up in New Hampshire with her young twins, was trying to get her mother to move in with them.
Eddie visited Langston Hughes, whose health had deteriorated but who gamely hung on in his 127th Street home. The two men talked of old times, and Eddie felt again, as he had years ago, that the great man was intentionally shying away from the subject of Junie. Indeed, hardly anybody spoke of Junie any longer, and not only because most people assumed she was dead. Even those who remembered Jewel Agony and Commander M had been forced to readjust their thinking, for America of the mid-sixties was chock-full of ragtag sects proclaiming with timid pride the primacy of the radical alternative, some of them violently. At lunch with Aurelia the other day, Eddie had wondered aloud what it was about America that drove children of privilege to demand the culture that had given them everything be burned to the ground.
“Ennui,” answered Aurelia, who lately had taken to speaking aloud the same hifalutin words that she wrote. She was now editor-in-chief of the Seventh Avenue Sentinel—given falling circulation, very likely the last editor the paper would ever have. She had also started work on a novel, which Eddie had promised to show to his agent.
“You think young people are bored?”
“I think young people have idle hands,” she said sternly. In the background, the restaurant was playing “Please Please Me” by the Beatles, but this new-style music was not to Eddie’s taste, or Aurelia’s.
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