Palace Council (23 page)

On the train ride back to Washington, Eddie pondered. He should be under surveillance. The federal government had lost track of Commander M, but keeping track of her brother would be a snap. Maybe Lenny used to watch him in Harlem, but Eddie no longer lived in Harlem. Someone had to be watching him now.

He wondered who.

Just before the train reached New York City, it shuddered to a halt. People looked out on the tracks for an obstacle. The conductor came on the public-address system. His voice was crackly and faint. But everybody heard.

President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. He was dead.

CHAPTER
33

An Editorial Dispute

(I)

I
N THE SPRING
of 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson went to Ann Arbor to deliver the first of several speeches in which he called upon his fellow Americans to build the “Great Society” that would overcome poverty and racial division. The ruling class greeted the news dolefully, but in Harlem the remaining salons sizzled with the conviction that a new day at last had dawned. Kennedy had been a fine fellow in his way, but this Johnson, Southern cracker though he was, seemed ready to push for everything black America had been demanding for a hundred years. The mood of the Negro press was celebratory—that is, the Negro press other than the
Seventh Avenue Sentinel,
whose editor, without consulting anybody, wrote a signed piece on page one warning that such apparent gifts never came without a cost, and that it might behoove the darker nation to spend less time dancing in the streets, and more time searching for the hidden puppeteers pulling the strings. Near the end of the column, she nevertheless issued a stirring call for nonviolence. She was really very hard on Jewel Agony, and the other militant groups springing up in the wake of its notoriety. All they would do, Aurelia insisted, was bring the darker nation to grief. The Commander M of whom all Harlem reverently spoke was making a deadly mistake.

Aurelia's husband was concerned. She was saying too much, he explained, over dinner in Manhattan.

“Too much about what?”

“I think you're putting together things I shouldn't have let slip.” He slid a copy of her editorial across the table. It was heavily underlined. “I think you were writing this to me.”

Aurelia looked down. “This is about Jewel Agony.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a while, playing with his steak. She waited for him to make the bridge, the way he always did. “Honey, look,” he finally said. “We don't have anything to do with Jewel Agony, okay?”

This set her back. “Who said you did?”

“You're implying it.”

“Kevin, no. You're wrong. This is about Jewel Agony. It's not about anything else.”

He pointed to one of the passages he had marked. “Then who's this? Who are the puppeteers?”

Aurelia laughed jerkily. “Honey, come on. All I know is, there's some kind of Project, and it's out of control. That's all you've told me. That and that Philmont Castle left a letter behind. Fine. I don't know what you and your—your group are up to, but, really, Kevin, I'm not accusing you of—of influencing Washington.”

Her husband never so much as smiled.

(II)

A
S SOON AS SCHOOL WAS OUT,
Aurelia packed the children into the station wagon and drove up to New Hampshire to visit Mona and the twins. The two women spent a lot of time walking in the woods while a Dartmouth student watched the kids. Mona hiked every day, usually several miles. She walked Aurelia into the ground.

Aurie told her old friend that she was tired of the
Sentinel.
She might bear the title of editor-in-chief, but Kevin owned the paper. “I'm working for my husband,” she said. “I want a real job.”

“Most women in America work for their husbands,” said Mona, who had been reading Betty Friedan. The two women were sitting on fallen trees, taking a break.

“You know what I mean.”

“You've finished grad school, right?”

“Just about.”

“So, do what I did. Teach college. I still owe you, honey. I'll help you find a job.”

Aurelia shook her head and dared not say what jumped to mind, that Kevin would never put up with it.

“Maybe when the kids are older,” she said. “They need me at home.”

Mona snorted. “Get up. Time to walk some more.”

“I can't. I'm worn out.”

“You need to stop smoking.”

“I need to rest.”

Later that night, the two women sat up in the kitchen, watching an old movie and sharing a very fine sherry, a gift to Mona from a lover.

“Eddie's pretty obsessed with his sister,” said Aurie after a bit.

“Wouldn't you be?”

“I guess. I'm just wondering if there's something I should do. Something I should say. He's in so much pain.”

She glanced at her friend. Mona's face was stony. “There is nothing you can do, Aurie. Nothing you can say. Don't you dare even try.”

“But maybe if I just—”

“You can't undo what's been done, honey. You start talking to Eddie about Junie and, well, you and I both know where that's going to lead.”

The guest bedroom was in the rafters. Aurelia lay awake for hours, watching through the dormer as the trees swayed beguilingly, teasing her with their ability to dance in place without losing their roots.

She knew what Eddie thought about Junie. She wondered what Junie thought about Eddie.

(III)

A
S IT HAPPENED,
Eddie often wondered the same thing. He had recently published a piece in the
New York Times
on the dangers of violence in a good cause, relying in large measure on a sermon Wesley Senior had preached back in the early fifties on Isaiah 60:18. Junie had always thought it one of her father's best, and Eddie probably hoped that Commander M, in whatever hideout, might read the essay, and remember her old pacifist self. Some intellectuals on the left, however, linked the theme of the essay to the Nixon piece from 1962, and concluded that the great Edward Trotter Wesley's conservative tilt was fully accomplished.

The critics were incorrect. In the months since the assassination of President Kennedy, Eddie's essays had been moving by increments in a more radical direction, almost as if he hoped to appeal, through his public pronouncements, to his missing sister. Like a lot of Kennedy's men, Eddie harbored serious doubts about Johnson, and the Great Society proposals never entirely assuaged his concerns. In early July, the new President signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, establishing broad protection for the darker nation against discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. As it happened, the employment provisions also applied to women. Opponents of the Act had forced this change, hoping the patent absurdity would scuttle its chances. Eddie suggested in
The Nation
that the barely mentioned amendment might, in the long run, work a larger change in American society than the more visible rules about race.
The Caucasians will forget about us,
he argued.
We are their servants. Women are their sisters and daughters and mothers. Liberating white women will strike them as more appealing than liberating Negro men.

Eddie received a rather droll note from his own mother:
And maybe when you and the white man are done with your feud about whom to liberate first, white women or Negro men, we can do something about liberating Negro women.

Then in August of 1964, when the new President informed the nation that North Vietnam had fired on a pair of American patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, Eddie's skepticism about Johnson flared into anger. Although the Vietnam expedition, at that time still relatively small, had always worried Eddie, he had accepted the assurances of those closest to Kennedy that the conflict could be managed. Now here was Johnson, demanding a special congressional resolution, and implying without ever quite saying that small was no longer possible. Within days of the attack, the resolution passed the House by unanimous vote, and the Senate with only two dissents. Eddie was beside himself. Not because he thought, as his friends did, that Johnson was lying about the attack. No. Eddie's concern was that the Tonkin Gulf incident had knocked from the front pages the discovery in Mississippi of the bodies of three missing civil-rights workers, dispelling the Klan propaganda that their disappearance was a hoax organized by outside agitators. In another essay, Eddie prophesied that the battle over the burgeoning war would capture the nation's attention, relegating the battle for racial justice to a sideshow.

Toward the end of August, a young black man was arrested in Mississippi, supposedly in the act of planting a bomb at the home of a local police chief linked to racist violence. Rumor said that he was a member of Agony, but he died in his cell before federal agents had the chance to interrogate him and find out for sure.

CHAPTER
34

The Festival Day

(I)

I
N
M
ARCH
of 1965, Senator Lanning Frost arrived in New York to speak at a series of fund-raisers, although everybody knew he was also testing the presidential waters, if not for 1968—when Johnson was expected to win in another Democratic landslide—then perhaps for 1972 or 1976. In his first term in the Senate, Frost had become wonderfully popular for his confusing way of interrogating witnesses: “Now, General, you're not trying to tell this committee that if we build this tank you won't be back for another one next year or not?” or “If we confirm you to be a judge, it won't be because you've been more than truthful here today, will it?” Standup comics loved him. But so did ordinary Joes, who seemed to think that one of their own had made it to the top. Besides, there were those who whispered that he was twisting his words intentionally, so that the witnesses would be bound to err in response. After all, pointed out his defenders, Senator Frost seemed perfectly relaxed when questioning the witnesses he liked. Eddie was not sure which side to believe. David Yee, at the Washington Bureau of the
Times,
had told his friend privately that he was quite certain that Lanning Frost was every bit as dim as he seemed. When he behaved himself, said David, it was because his wife, Margot, wrote his lines for him.

“How has he gotten so far?” Eddie asked, bewildered. “If he's really as thick as a post, why are people talking about him as President?”

“Margot Frost is six times smarter than her husband. She tells him what to think and what to say. If they ever get to the White House, Lanning will be the face and the voice of the Administration, but, believe me, Margot will be the brains.”

Eddie had never forgotten the cross around Margot's neck. George Collier, the man who had searched his house, once worked for Margot's father: reason enough to want a closer look at Margot's husband, the future President. In Washington, Eddie was never able to penetrate the layers protecting the Senator from contact with the world. He had occasionally encountered him at White House functions or Georgetown cocktail parties, but questions were always deflected by an aide, or by Margot herself. Never had Eddie been able to speak to the Senator alone. He did not expect to do so in Harlem, either, but Harlem was at least not Washington. In Harlem, Eddie knew everyone. He would be on home ground. If there was one place where Eddie stood a chance of piercing the protective shield of young assistants and talking to Senator Frost one-on-one, that place would be Harlem. Eddie postponed a trip to Alabama, where he planned to interview a Negro preacher who had founded a new political party called the Black Panthers, and instead drove from Washington up to New York City to hear the Senator deliver the Palm Sunday address at Saint Philip's Episcopal Church, on 134th Street, where, despite their move out to Mount Vernon, Aurelia and her children occasionally attended services, and Kevin Garland was a senior vestryman. Eddie wangled an invitation to the VIP-only reception afterward at the apartment the Garlands still kept at 409 Edgecombe for their visits to the city.

Saint Philip's was one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the darker nation. Eddie hated all churches, but found the Episcopal high-church tradition incomprehensible. The tinkling of the bells annoyed him, the clouds of incense choked him, and the secret code confused him: someone always seemed to be announcing that the lectors' guild would meet in the undercroft, which should be entered via the narthex following the post-Eucharistic prayer in the nave. The vast sanctuary, with its high ornate ceiling, was packed, and a surprising number of the faces were white, everyone jostling to see the future President in the flesh. Eddie stood along with the others for the opening procession. The thurifer passed them, the crucifer guarded by two youngsters with candles, senior vestrymen with their staves of office (including Kevin), followed by the choir, another crucifer, more candles, the deacons, and then the Senator himself, followed by the rector. No sign of Margot. Eddie strained to find her in the first row of pews. He did not have a good angle of sight. He was squeezed into the back, hoping to remain unrecognized, so that he might observe without being observed. From the way the smiling woman across the aisle was nudging her husband, however, it seemed that his plan would fail.

He continued searching for Margot. By craning his neck around an obstructing pillar, he thought he could make out the back of Margot's head, but he could not be sure. A character in one of his novels had remarked that, from behind, all white women look alike. As Eddie stretched and squinted, a voice ordered him querulously to stop blocking the view. When he turned to apologize, the woman behind him widened her eyes. “Sorry, Mr. Wesley,” she said.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, and smiled.

“Room for one more?” said a man at his side, and Eddie found himself staring into the playful eyes of Gary Fatek, who was excusing his way down the pew.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie whispered.

“My family likes to scout future Presidents.”

“To figure out how much it will cost to buy them?”

“Or how much they're going to cost us in taxes.” He lifted a finger, pointed to the hymnal. “Now, shut up and sing.”

Because the congregation was singing: the processional hymn, not to be confused with the introit, although it always was. The words to the hymns always reminded him of the certitudes of Wesley Senior. Yet he did his best, because what remained of the Harlem he had known was on parade today. Aurelia was in the choir, along with Chamonix Bing, former wife of his old friend Charlie. One of the altar boys was Aurelia's son, Locke. The Old Testament lesson was read by a DeForde. And when the time came for the sermon, it was Kevin Garland, resplendent in maroon robe, who stood up to introduce the guest of honor.

Eddie watched the man who had won Aurelia. Never slim, Kevin had gained weight. He was not as barrel-chested as his late father, and he lacked entirely Matty's air of being ready to buy you a drink or tangle with you in the alley, but growing prosperity had somehow worked in reverse, tempering the hauteur Eddie remembered from the old days. It was as if every dollar he earned left him calmer and more generous. Perhaps it even did: rumor spoke of the enormous sums Kevin and Aurelia gave to good causes. One of their good causes was evidently the career of Lanning Frost, whom they supported avidly, even though Lanning was a Democrat, and Kevin was very much the other thing.

Eddie turned to look at Aurelia, sitting in the choir loft. She was beaming at her husband. The selfish part of Eddie had hoped for a look of irritation, boredom, reproach, anything to signal a crack in the façade. But she just kept smiling. Eddie tried to calm himself. There were other women. He had been with more than a few over the years. But he could not tear his eyes from the one he had wanted most. His father used to preach that jealousy and covetousness were at the root of every sin, and Eddie thought this very likely true. He all but trembled with pain and loss until Gary Fatek laid delicate fingers across his arm and, leaning close, whispered, “If you don't stop, you won't get any ice cream after”—a sentiment so incongruous and absurd that Eddie forgot himself, laughing so hard that the same woman who had ordered him to stop blocking the view now hissed at him to hush.

Gary turned, gave a little bow, and said, solemnly, “He can't help it, ma'am. It's the incense. It makes him high.”

(II)

K
EVIN
was not an accomplished public speaker. He was nervous, and fussed with his glasses a lot as he read from the paper in front of him. He seemed not to realize that Lanning Frost needed no introducing. The buzz passing through the congregation would have told a wiser man to shut up and sit down, but Kevin droned on about the schools the Senator had attended and the offices to which he had been elected and the bills to which he had attached his name. When at last he was done, Kevin blinked in surprise, as if he expected to find another page. But his smile as he stood aside was delighted and smooth.

It was Lanning Frost's turn. He stood there, tall and trim, with sharp eyes and long pink cheeks that lent to his otherwise ordinary face a certain cheery authority, like your favorite grade-school teacher. He had brown hair lightly frosted, as if to match his name, and, at forty-three years old, as dynamic and articulate as you could wish, looked every inch the presidential timber that everyone described. Eddie wondered how much of the legend was true, if a man so phenomenally successful in so short a political career could possibly be as dim a bulb as David Yee and others insisted.

Everyone heard the stories. Everyone heard the jokes. But just now nobody in the pews much cared. This was, after all,
the
Lanning Frost. The congregation rose and applauded, and he waved them back into their seats, reminding them in his warm, calmly commanding voice that this was the Lord's day, not a time to be cheering a sinner like himself. The laughter rippling along the pews was the best evidence that he had scored already, and scored high. The Senator's delivery was awkward but endearing, like a man who has memorized the big words for a quiz, never quite mastering them.

“He's quite an act,” murmured Gary.

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Erebeth says he's a ninny.”

“Erebeth says everybody's a ninny.”

Lanning tossed out a couple of obligatory jokes, mangling the funnier of the pair. But people laughed anyway, because this was a future President.

“You know his wife, right?” said Gary.

“Margot?”

The Senator was smiling as he related a tale from his childhood, something about being caught cheating at a game in kindergarten. The congregation was chuckling when it was supposed to, even when Frost did not.

“You've met her?”

“Sure.”

“Because there's this story I heard about her—”

“Will you gentlemen please hush?”

Again Gary turned. “My apologies, ma'am. You've heard of this new treatment for mental illness? Talk therapy? Well, that's what he has. Someone has to talk to him every few minutes. It's starting to wear me out, frankly. You can help if you like.”

“Wait till she spreads that one,” whispered Eddie, moaning.

“That's right,” said Gary, eyes front.

The rest of the Senator's talk was what Eddie would have guessed: America a great country…by God's grace the greatest nation the world has ever known…applause…facing unprecedented challenges both here and abroad…need for leadership of vision and firmness but leavened by compassion…keep working to build the Great Society…applause…win the battle over Communism…less applause…ease the transition from a wartime economy…tackle fundamental issues of poverty and racial injustice…applause…will not allow justice to be held hostage to a handful of violent racists defending a way of life that is indefensible…deafening applause…we will work together to ease the suffering of all…and so we shall be free…we shall be free!

They were on their feet, pounding the pews, stamping their feet, Christian soldiers ready to march to the polling places.

Eddie, stunned, rose only because Gary tugged on his arm.

We shall be free.

The words from the upside-down crucifix. The short hairs prickled on the back of Eddie's neck.

We shall be free.

Maybe Lanning knew. Whatever Margot was up to that brought her the Cross of Saint Peter to wear around her neck, whatever her connection to the late Philmont Castle and the mysterious George Collier, maybe the Senator knew.

Eddie looked around. Everyone was wild-eyed with enthusiasm. There was no denying the truth. The people in this church would in a few short years be joining with their fellow citizens across the country to elect Lanning Frost President of the United States.

“I think I want to hear that story,” Eddie whispered to Gary as the cheering went on and on.

(III)

I
NSTEAD
of going as planned to the invitation-only party at the Garlands', Eddie followed Gary into his Bentley. Gary told the chauffeur to drive around a bit, then closed the glass. He noticed Eddie's look.

“Erebeth insists. She says if I'm going to run the trusts I have to look the part.” He laughed. “I'm not allowed to stay in the Village, either. Erebeth wants me to have a townhouse on Fifth for my salon, and a place on the water in Greenwich or somewhere for my big parties. I asked her, isn't it better not to waste all that money. Erebeth told me being rich is not the same as being powerful. There are lots of millionaires who couldn't get their alderman on the phone—that's what Erebeth says. She says if you don't have the parties nobody pays attention to you, and then you can't get anything done. And believe me, Eddie, I'm going to get things done.”

Eddie was still studying the car: the upholstery, the old-fashioned speaking tube, the walnut inlays, the diamond clock.

“I believe you.”

“You don't approve.”

“Let me put it this way. The rich have more power than the poor, and I'd rather it was you than Erebeth.”

“But she
admires
the
Negroes,
” Gary drawled, and this time cracked only himself up.

“Tell me about Margot,” Eddie said when his friend's hilarity had died. It had been a year at least since the two men had spoken, and Eddie supposed he should be asking how Gary's life was going, but the car, and his evident intention to yield to Erebeth, were information enough.

“She's having an affair,” said Gary.

Eddie was scarcely interested. He had hoped for some gigantic revelation. “Is that so?”

“That's what I hear.”

“I see.”

“In Harlem,” added Gary, savoring his little jest.

Eddie perked up. “What?”