Over the din, she can just make out Mitch’s voice asking if she could go somewhere more quiet.
She walks onto the lawn past the line of tiki torches. “Mitch. Hi. Sorry. It’s so loud here. The food is great. Everyone’s been—”
“Listen, Eleanor,” Mitch cuts her off. “I need you to listen,” he says again in a forceful voice that scares her.
“Sure,” she says. “Is everything okay?”
“Is everything okay? No, no. It’s not.”
Eleanor, listening very intently now, notices that his voice is shaking. “There’s been an accident. Jamie. He, he, he was on his bike. I don’t know what happened, a car was passing a moped, that guy’s dead, there was sand on the road.”
Eleanor puts her hand to her mouth. “Those sirens.”
“Yeah.” He breathes in the word, like the Swedes do.
“Is he . . . ?” She is about to say “all right,” but that is clearly not the case, yet she can’t bring herself to say “dead.” “Is he . . . ?” she begins again.
“He’s alive.”
“Oh my God. Thank God.”
“But they said he was hit pretty hard, and—”
Eleanor can hear the violent effort he is making to control his voice.
“And the stupid little shit wasn’t wearing his helmet.” He starts to sob, which makes Eleanor start to cry too.
“None of them want to wear their helmets,” she says. “None of them.”
“He’s unconscious but he’s alive,” Mitch says when he has himself under control again. “They’re going to medevac him to Boston as soon as possible. I’m going to the hospital now to see if I can ride with him, but you need to get Lauren to the hospital as quickly as you can. She’ll want to go too if she can make it there in time.”
“Okay.”
“I tried calling but she didn’t pick up, and . . .” His voice starts to break again. “I can’t tell her on the phone. I can’t fall apart right now. Just say that there’s been an accident. And then drive her to the hospital as quickly as you can.”
The way that he keeps repeating the phrase “there’s been an accident” makes Eleanor realize that someone—the police—must have used it with him.
The accident. Life will forever become the before and after.
“Eleanor, can you do this?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll do it, and we’ll get her to the hospital. We’ll meet you there as soon as we can.
“Wait, Mitch?” she calls just as he’s about to hang up. “Should I tell her how bad it is?”
“Umm.” Her question seems to paralyze him and she immediately regrets asking it. “I don’t know. Umm.”
“I think I shouldn’t,” she says quickly, wanting to spare him in some way. “I’ll just say that we don’t know. Better for her to be hopeful right now.”
She turns back toward the house in a kind of delirium of grief and rage. All the people talking so intensely with each other—about tennis games and political appointments, about abstract notions of how to make the world a better place. What does it matter? Her friend’s son has just been hit by a car. He might die or never be able to walk again. Feisty Jamie, with his unruly hair and skinny torso, his fingers that are as delicate as a woman’s.
Jamie might die. That is real.
But it isn’t real. Eleanor can’t begin to feel the depths of this anguish. She can’t foresee how she will upend her own life and marriage over the next year to see her best friend through the worst imaginable thing anyone should have to go through. She strides across the deck to find Daniel before heading to the kitchen’s back door.
• • •
When people at the party tell the story later, they will search for how to describe the sound that Lauren makes on seeing Eleanor’s face, connecting the echo of those sirens with the realization that they came for her own flesh and blood. The partygoers will start by explaining that they were at the Michaelses’ place, standing in the living room or on the deck—the Obamas are supposed to come, but then Ted Kennedy died and they don’t make it; the party is still very nice until . . . There are these sirens, I remember, that go on forever, and everyone seems to have the same thought at once: Has something terrible happened to the president? The sirens pass and the party resumes, until about forty-five minutes or so later, another sound comes from the kitchen. It’s like a sharp cry—like a bird that’s been shot. Or a keening—isn’t that the word? It’s the sound of someone’s heart just being ripped right out and it cuts through all the political talk. The caterer’s ten-year-old son. Traumatic brain injury. There was a moped involved, the rider died. Apparently the boy wasn’t wearing a helmet. So incredibly sad. Maybe you saw the posters for the fundraiser to cover his medical expenses, since their insurance didn’t. Hillary Clinton went, which was nice of her.
Eleanor stands outside the kitchen door, invisible in the darkness on the deck, looking in on her friend, seated now on a stool at the kitchen island, a little juice glass of red wine at her side, chatting with one of her staff, soaking up the relief of a big night that has come off well. And it has, Eleanor thinks. The food was delicious; everyone kept saying so. And her trays, with their petals and peppers, looked so beautiful.
BLISS BROYARD is the author of the bestselling story collection My Father, Dancing, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the award-winning memoir One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, which was named a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune. Her stories and essays have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The Art of the Essay, among others, and she has written for many publications, including the New York Times, newyorker.com, and Elle. She is at work on a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard called Happy House.
STEPHEN L. CARTER
* * *
Compline
(1)
In the attic room with its lunette windows of stained glass covering three points of the compass, the man they call the Lecturer writes and writes and writes as he waits for the pigs to come and kill him. The autumn afternoon is crisp and bright. The attic is cool. The daylight prisms through the windows and shimmies on the ancient carpet in a slow promenade of color. He is alone in the cavernous Harlem town house. Junie and Sharon were the last to depart, and they begged him to join them. The Lecturer refused. He no longer believes in God but he still believes in fate. He is where he is supposed to be. An old Ruger .22 and an Iver Johnson Cadet .38 lie side by side on the table near his yellow pad, and a Walther snuggles in the brown leather holster looped around the back of his hard wooden chair. On the floor within easy reach is a 12-gauge shotgun, broken open because he is nervous about the shells. Beneath the front window an M1 carbine leans against the wall, but he mistrusts the M1, which has a tendency to jam. Beside it is a Remington Gamemaster, a hunting gun that doubles as a sniper rifle. Other weapons are scattered here and there, but the Lecturer prefers to rely on explosives. Hand grenades are wired to the front and back doors, and he has played a little game with Semtex beneath the stairs. He is perfectly aware that the other comrades are afraid of him. They also suspect he might be crazy, but what they see as madness he sees as dedication. Sharon tried to tell him where the group was heading, in the hope that they might rendezvous later, but the Lecturer would not listen. He has been tortured before and has the misshapen fingertips to prove it. Should he be taken alive, he has no illusion that he could long resist drugs or electrodes or whatever else J. Edgar and his gray men might pull out of their bag of tricks. With Nixon in the White House, anything is possible.
The Lecturer is writing with a Flair, the felt-tip pen that has lately become all the rage. Another in the series of pointless toys developed by the capitalists to enthrall the masses. He has finished three pages. He puts down the pen and stretches his fingers. Agony is done. That is the name by which the public knows the terror cell that over the past week has all but disbanded: Agony. Just last month they were still eight. Two da
ys ago they were four. Wayne, the youngest, fled this morning. Sharon and Junie were the last two. Except for Frederick, the Lecturer reminds himself, unconsciously balling his fists. Frederick, he of the mysterious sources. Frederick, not a member of Agony but somehow always in touch. Surely Frederick was lurking somewhere nearby: Frederick, who called just past midnight to say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew they were in Harlem and would soon find their hideout. Frederick, who, as the Lecturer told the others yesterday, himself bore all the marks of playing both sides of the street. It must have been Frederick, he said, who sold them out to the FBI. Sharon, the drug-addled blonde who had seized command of Agony three years ago, insisted that the idea was ridiculous, but Sharon was besotted with Frederick. Junie, too, came to Frederick’s defense, most likely because she did not want to think ill of a man she had known since they were children.
It makes no difference now, the Lecturer tells himself grimly.
The Lecturer. All the comrades call him by that name except Junie, who still calls him Jeremy, the nom de guerre under which he traveled on the occasion of their second meeting, in the safe house down in Charleston in 1966, where he had been sent to investigate the murder of the elderly Klansman who was locked in the basement, the only key to which she wore around her neck. She swore that she had not let it out of her sight, and yet it was impossible that she could be the killer. That was why they needed an expert. And that was when they became bitter enemies.
The pen scratches across the page. The Lecturer pretends that he is writing to his mother, who still lives in New Haven in the house where her boy was raised. He has not seen her since he left graduate school five years ago, during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, in which he did not participate because he was overseas. Then he decides that he is writing to his father, who died at the hands of the police while his boy was in college. No, that is a lie. He is writing for posterity. The FBI will surely seize the letter, and the pigs never throw anything away. The pages will sit in a file in a vault in a storeroom for years or decades. And one day someone will find them, read them, maybe publish them.
For posterity.
(2)
When the man whose name is not Jeremy was a small boy, his father used to take him to baseball games at the Polo Grounds to see the New York Cubans, owned by the colorful numbers runner Alex Pompez, and later, as the Negro leagues faded, to see the New York Giants with their colored stars: first Monte Irvin, and then, in 1951, Ray Noble and Artie Wilson, who was soon sent back to the minor leagues in exchange for an unknown rookie named Willie Mays. The boy loved these excursions with his father. They would take the streetcar to Union Station, not far from Yale, where they would board the trim, modern cars of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad for the air-conditioned ride into the city. At Pennsylvania Station they would board the Eighth Avenue line of the IND for the ride to Upper Manhattan. The boy valued these hours alone with his father. His father was a big, bluff man, with a stern mien that scared the toughest kids in the neighborhood halfway to the grave. He worked in New Haven as a hotel doorman. He was the senior deacon of the church. He loved to read. Their house was full of books. As they walked from the subway to the ballpark, he would tell his son stories from Shakespeare and Aeschylus and William Wells Brown.
Outside the Polo Grounds the throng would jostle and push, but the boy’s father managed somehow to create an island of peace around the two of them. Perhaps it was the stories. He would keep talking right up until they were inside the gates, where he would buy a program and a pencil because he was teaching the boy to keep score. But what the Lecturer remembered best was how just before they ducked beneath the wall, his father liked to point to the tall apartment buildings on the bluff overlooking the stadium. That’s where the rich Negroes live, his father would say. The crest of Harlem. Sugar Hill, it’s called. The boy would stare, goggle-eyed. Sugar Hill. Even the name was magic. True, he did not entirely believe that such things as rich Negroes existed, but he would never dream of disputing his father. Sometimes he wondered whether he might live in one of those grand apartments one day. Sometimes he hated himself for coveting that life and wondered whether he might be headed to hell. But as he grew older, he came to despise the people who lived in those elegant apartments more than he despised the white people who made the rules that confined them there. They were the most talented members of what his father called the darker nation, and should therefore have been leading the revolutionary cadres. Instead they spent their lives eagerly gathering the crumbs that fell from the capitalist table. That, at least, was what Kimberly always said, back in the days when he still believed that Kimberly was always right.
(3)
The light has changed. He crosses to the southwest window, sweeping up the .38 in one smooth motion. He stands on a chair and peers down into the alley. The house fronts on Edgecombe Avenue, at one time the smartest address in Sugar Hill. For a moment his vision clouds as he remembers his mother’s tales of dinner tables laid for twenty or more, of Duke Ellington on the piano, of antique furnishings imported from Italy and France, of the Negro society weddings where one might find Frank Sinatra among the guests. In his mind’s eye, black men and women dressed to the nines promenade through glittering hotel ballrooms as the band plays. Then, with an effort of will, the Lecturer wipes the images from his mind. It is all nonsense. This is 1969, not 1949. They were enemies to the revolution and traitors to the race. In any case, they long ago fled Harlem, leaving their less fortunate brethren behind. The very town house Agony is renting—the group was far too savvy to risk being caught by playing the role of squatters—is owned by a woman named Veazie, who according to Frederick once presided over Harlem society, deciding who would be invited to the best parties and who would be frozen out.
“What nonsense,” the Lecturer repeats aloud.
He is still at the window. He is watching a blue appliance repair van that has been parked across the street for at least two hours now. Maybe. Maybe not. On the stoop of an apartment building, three men are passing a bottle back and forth. They could be the neighborhood drunks; or they could be watching the house.
He will know soon enough.
He abandons the window, returns to the table, and once more takes up his pen. He has decided that he is actually writing for the eager, frightened kids he has instructed in training camps in Cuba and Algeria and Syria, the youngsters whom he helped transform from callow, disillusioned children of the West into cadres prepared to do whatever is necessary to advance the revolution. His legacy.
He wonders, briefly, how many fascist provocateurs his protégés have eliminated, and tries not to think about how many innocents have died alongside them. There are slogans and arguments to justify those deaths, and he has led the chants, but at the moment he finds himself not quite able to remember them.
Junie’s influence, he suspects.
(4)
Around age thirteen, the Lecturer joined what the members called a gang, although by then he was perfectly aware of the real gangs that were starting to battle for New Haven street corners. The boy’s gang numbered five or six, together with a scattering of hangers-on. None of them were considered the toughest kids in the neighborhood, but banding together made them feel as if they were. They did no violence. They extorted no money. They climbed on the girders at construction sites and snuck into Yale buildings after dark. The oldest boy, Charles, whom everyone called Sug, would swipe candy bars and gum from stores. Sometimes Sug would post one of the others as lookout, but the boy who would grow into the Lecturer refused. He also would not take the candy. But he was usually the leader on the expeditions through the steam tunnels connecting the various university structures. He loved the close ceiling, the gurgling water, the heat, and the darkness. The pudgy Sug could barely keep up and half the time found an excuse not to go. So the Lecturer’s main companions were Rhoden, a dark, skinny youth with bright, scary eyes, and the Packer twins, Mark and Marvin, who both wore
glasses and were always getting into fights with each other. There were Sunday afternoons when the group would sneak around the campus for hours. They were never caught.
The Lecturer took a secret pride in these expeditions, not so much because the tunnels were scary but because Yale was. Yale dominated New Haven, but apart from a handful of students, no Negro dared step onto the campus except in service. That was what his father always said. His mother cleaned the offices at Yale and his father greeted the returning alumni when they came to the hotel where he worked, but otherwise his parents avoided the university grounds with an almost superstitious awe. All of New Haven’s Negroes did. There were stories of a colored student spotted here or there, but none of the gang was quite sure if the stories were true. The students whom they encountered were big and white and resplendent in their Yale sweaters and scarves and seemed to float above the concerns of real people. His father used to say that Harvard trained its men to run the country and Yale trained its men to run the world. And already at age thirteen, the boy understood that he would never be part of either group. And so he settled instead for leading his gang through the steam tunnels, peeking into the hidden corners of the campus, enjoying the sense that he could, quite invisibly, infiltrate this citadel of which New Haven’s whites were so proud.
On a rainy evening in July 1953, the Lecturer and his gang found their way into the blocky granite fortress housing one of what Yale called senior societies and most of the world called secret societies. The place was like a mausoleum, marble and cold. These societies, his father had taught him, were the places where they chose the men who would run the future. The boys were agog. The exterior was so bland but the inside was so opulent. There were chandeliers. There were paintings and tapestries. Display cases lined the walls. One case held carvings of animals and monsters from around the world. He stared. Most were labeled with the names of their countries of origin, but the card on one shelf read simply Africa. Even at thirteen he understood the discrimination. Africa was a European invention. That was what his father always told him. The rest of the world America saw as countries—Germany, France, India, China, Argentina, Peru—but Africa was just Africa, an agglomeration of separate tribes and nations for the convenience of the West. The Lecturer stood there staring, and eventually the other boys, who had been running raucously up and down the stairs and trying to make the elevator work, came and stood beside him. The Packer twins asked him what was wrong. He said nothing. But Rhoden had a sixth sense. He was holding a shiny gold tankard with an engraved inscription that he evidently intended to take as booty. Now Rhoden swung the tankard hard at the case with the little carved animals and monsters. The glass shattered. He dropped the tankard, which bounced loudly and, now dented, rolled along the slate floor. Help yourself, he said. The Packer twins hesitated. The Lecturer did not. He gathered as many of the “Africa” carvings as he could. The twins got the message and swept up the rest. The Lecturer led them downstairs to the grand hall with its long wooden banquet table. He placed the carvings on the table, one in front of each chair. The other boys followed his example. There were thirty chairs, and they did not quite have enough carvings to put one at each place, but it was close enough. Are we done? asked one of the Packer twins, trembling with excitement and fear. The Lecturer was perfectly calm. I believe we are, yes, he said, in the strange cadences he had learned from his father. It’s just a joke, he told them. They left the way they had come in, through the steam tunnels in the basement, and they did no more damage, although Rhoden turned out to have stuffed four silver place settings into his jacket. For my ma, he said.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 5