Palace Council (37 page)

CHAPTER
52

Reintegration

(I)

W
HEN
E
DDIE ENCOUNTERED
A
URELIA
on New Year's Eve of 1969, he had been back for nine months. He had touched down at Dulles Airport in March of 1969, just before his forty-second birthday, two months after the inauguration of Richard Nixon, and of a new era in politics. The American voter, as he tended to do every couple of decades, had suffered a melodramatic change of mind. Martin Luther King was dead. Robert Kennedy was dead. Campuses trembled. Cities burned. The Great Society promoted by Lyndon Johnson had turned to ashes—in Saigon, said some, or in the angry flames licking through the nation's cities. White America fled to the suburbs. After its heavy defeat in the Civil War, the apologists for the Confederacy had proclaimed that the South would rise again, and so it had, a century later, electing conservatives nationwide on a tidal wave of snickers and code words and hints. Or so Eddie proclaimed in a
Rolling Stone
interview published a couple of weeks before he set foot on American soil.

Nobody was sure what to make of him. He had been such a moderate soul, mistrusted by the left, tolerated by the right, beloved by no one other than a few literary critics. But the stuff he had written from abroad seemed so angry—particularly that
Report from Military Headquarters,
the book Megan Hadley would later praise at dinner with Aurelia. There was talk, once again, of clawing back some of Eddie's many awards. It was one thing to be antiwar, another to seem so—well—anti-America.

At Dulles he went through customs, and Mindy, back for another stint as his assistant, met him at the barrier with a perky smile and a banner that read
WELCOME HOME
, which she had trouble opening. In the interim she had done a little magazine writing. As for Eddie, after the events in Hong Kong, he had visited another writer he knew in India, probably overstaying his welcome, and had spent time in Kampala, lecturing at Makerere University, known at this time as the Harvard of Africa. Then it was on to Oxford for his visiting appointment, during which he had spent a lot of time deciding what to do next. Rushing back to an America he no longer understood was not high on his list of choices.

Mindy was accompanied by a neatly dressed young man of their nation, a Morehouse graduate named Zach who turned out to be her fiancé. Zach was a law student. He carried Eddie's bags. They had borrowed somebody's station wagon. Zach drove. Eddie sat beside him. From the back, Mindy prattled on about the wonderful offers that were waiting.

“So I hear,” said Eddie.

“You're on all the shelves,” she breathed. “In the
front
of the store.”

Eddie nodded. He could not keep up with the changes. He had returned to a strange land in which white schoolchildren suddenly read books by Negro authors. The canon had been exploded,
Invisible Man
had replaced
Silas Marner,
and two novels by Edward T. Wesley made the high-school reading lists regularly. All across America, students wrote college-entrance essays on science as metaphor in
Field's Unified Theory,
or the social inversions in
Netherwhite.
His publisher was ecstatic. The public-school curriculum, his editor explained, was where the money was. The trick now was to build on the momentum. Eddie had promised a novel about a Negro in Hong Kong—a black man, as everybody said nowadays—and his editor, Stock, was the portrait of long-suffering eagerness. The new novel, she said, would be an enormous success. Fans were waiting. It had been five years since
Pale Imitation.
Kasten, his agent, demanded and received a ridiculous advance.

But Eddie was determined not to rush. He was still regaining his balance after the events in Southeast Asia. He sought solitude. He had revived his academic appointment at Georgetown. Mindy had found him a large house on Albemarle Street, not far from Rock Creek Park. All of his furniture had been moved. All of his books had been unpacked. The new house had shelves everywhere. It had five bedrooms. It was set back from the road and screened by trees. Dropping him off, they asked if he needed them to stay.

He said he did not.

Alone in an America he did not recognize, he went into the kitchen. Mindy had stocked the larder. He found an apple and stood munching in the window, looking for signs of surveillance. He saw none. But he had come to doubt his perceptions. Since the events in the warehouse, Eddie occasionally saw things that were not there, or missed things that were. A kind of mental flex, he had told the pompous psychiatrist he had consulted briefly at Oxford. A twisting of the mind, as though I am back in the tank of water. Say, once every couple of months. The psychiatrist had nodded indulgently, proposing to get to the root of the fantasy, plainly not believing that the events of the horrible night in Hong Kong had actually occurred.

Eddie had quit after the third visit.

And for all that, he had found no trace of Junie. He had been shot at, beaten, and tortured, he had discovered Benjamin Mellor and led Collier to him, but he had not found his sister. Perhaps she really was dead.

Eddie took another couple of bites of the apple, then tossed the core. He continued to watch the gray street as gray shadows drew out from gray houses. He watched until the trees swallowed them, then watched some more. Full dark, and Eddie could not stop watching.

Sooner or later, they would come for him.

(II)

O
N HIS THIRD DAY BACK
in the States, Eddie had dinner with Gary Fatek at a steak house on K Street. Gary's red hair was thinner, his pale body thicker. He had visited Eddie in England twice and India once, and now, on his way to Buenos Aires, had stopped in Washington to welcome his old friend back to the States. He dug into his chop like a man too busy to eat.

“I hear you're the big Republican now,” said Eddie, marveling.

“Nah. It's just, the family's that way.”

“And you, personally?”

Gary shrugged. “I don't have time for politics any more. But I gather you do.”

“If this is about the book—”

“Nope. Haven't read it. Don't plan to. Wars are trivial. Economies are what matter. Erebeth used to say that, and she was right. Never mind.” Hunching forward. “You've met Nixon, right? I've gotten to know him pretty well. He's a weird, paranoid man who always thinks everybody's out to get him. Here's the thing. I've sat with him two or three times since the inauguration. He keeps asking if I've heard from you. He's a pretty obsessive guy, but he's really obsessed with you.”

“No.”

“Yes. He wants to know what you have against him.”

“I don't have anything against him, Gary. Will you tell him that?”

“Sure.” Back to the steak. “But I don't know that he'll believe me.”

The next night, Mona Veazie called from Hanover, wanting to see if he might be willing to come speak at Dartmouth. Gary had given her the number.

“I might,” he said, exhausted.

“Good. Because I've got a girl for you.”

“You have what?”

“A girl for you. Named Gwen. Very sweet. You should meet her. Don't worry, she's black.”

Eddie remembered that Mona's mother, Amaretta, had been not only Harlem's premier Czarina but its leading matchmaker as well.

“Not interested,” he said. Kindly.

Meanwhile, the papers were full of news about Lanning Frost. His rise seemed inevitable. Nixon had been in office two months and already the journalists were handicapping his likely opponents in 1972. The Senator was described as tough and honest and hardworking.

His wife was described as brilliant.

One morning Eddie watched Frost on television, being interviewed about the war. “It would hardly be appropriate,” said the Senator, “to second-guess whatever the potential outcome of strategies that I think it would be wrong of me to disclose at this time.”

The enchanted look on the reporter's face told the viewers that no insight had ever been deeper.

(III)

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK,
Eddie drove north on the recently completed Interstate 95 to visit his mother in Boston. He expected to find her shrunken and weak after four years of living without her husband. Instead, he found Marie ebullient, yet guarded by an unusually pensive Marcella, who tracked Eddie from room to room as if expecting him to steal the silver. Marie prepared a huge meal, all the foods her son had loved since childhood. Eddie could not remember experiencing such contentment in the bosom of his family. Not while his father was alive, he conceded guiltily.

Later that night, he sat in the kitchen with a still contemplative Marcella, who wore a long robe and bunny slippers. She brewed tea. Marcella was tall and stolid and implied eternity, just as their father had. She and Sheldon had married the month after college graduation. They had set straight to work making babies. The siblings traded small talk for a while. They told each other stories about Junie, some of them true. They speculated about where she was now.

“I've been meaning to ask you something. I read what you wrote about the war. I mostly agree with you.” Marcella stirred her tea. “Tell me something, Eddie. If you had a son, and he was eighteen, what would you do? About the war, I mean.”

The question surprised him. He had never thought about it. Even if he put aside the events in Hong Kong, memories of his own brief experience in Vietnam kept him awake many a night, the fried hand that crunched like chicken bones particularly. He had never for one moment imagined the possibility that his own flesh and blood could actually die in a rice paddy, helmet clutched to his head, or be blown to bits in a sidewalk café. Only other people's children did that.

“I don't know. I don't have a son.”

“But what if you did?” Marcella persisted.

Eddie felt trapped. He waited for the flex that caught him at moments of stress, but it spared him this time. “I'd send him to Canada. What else?”

His sister frowned. “I only have daughters. But my Sarah is graduating from Boston College next year, and my Ruth is a sophomore. If they were boys, well, they'd be eligible for the draft.” She dropped her solemn eyes. “I'd tell them to go, Eddie. I would hate it. I would cry every minute they were away. I hate this war. I think it's terrible. But I would tell them to go. Not to Canada. To Vietnam. It would be their duty, Eddie. To give something back.” The dark eyes came up again, pained yet unbending. “America has been good to us, Eddie. Our children don't have the right not to go.”

“How can you say America has been good to us? Look at the history of—”

“Look at the
present.
Where else would you prefer to raise your children?”

Eddie, who had faced this question many times over the past two years, gave his usual answer. “Did you ever read this story by Langston Hughes called ‘Poor Little Black Fellow'? One of his best, Marcie, and he wrote a lot of great ones. It's about a Negro boy who's raised by a rich white family. His father was the family servant, and died in France in World War I. The white family raises the son as their own. They love him, but they make him sleep in the attic, because they think he would be uneasy sleeping among them. They look for a good Negro college for him to attend, because they think he would be uncomfortable at Harvard. They're trying to help. When the family takes him to Paris after he finishes high school, he decides to stay, because he hates America. The white woman who raised him starts to cry. She says, ‘But your father
died
for America.' The young man—he's not a boy any more, he can make up his own mind—the young man looks at her and says, ‘I guess he was a fool.' The point is—”

“Oh, I get the point, Eddie. I just don't happen to agree. I don't happen to think it's right to take the country's benefits and then try to make sure the burdens fall on somebody else's children.”

“And suppose the war is immoral? What then?”

“You send your children anyway,” said Marcella, very cool. He had the sense she had spent a lot of time rehearsing the conversation in her mind, but had not been able to have it with anybody else. “You have no right to send somebody else to die in their place. And then you do what you can to stop the killing.”

“It's not me who'd be sending them,” Eddie began, but his sister rolled right over him. He had never known her to be so voluble. Or insistent. It occurred to him that the mantle of head of the family had already passed.

“This is where your lack of faith makes you weaker. Not just you. The whole country. Children become a kind of talisman. Almost a possession. You do not like or trust your fellow man, and you have no one greater than yourself to whom to turn. So you engage in idolatry. Preserve your children's lives at all costs. Do not, under any circumstances, put them at risk. Not when you can risk someone else's child instead.” Stirring, not drinking. “That's not terribly charitable of you, Eddie.”

“You sound like Dad.”

Marcella smiled briefly. “I love your novels, Eddie. I've read them all. You have a gift. The writing. It's beautiful. Last year I started reading the book about the war. The
Report.
Just the first few essays. I couldn't finish it, Eddie. I couldn't believe you felt that way about your country.”

The old Eddie would have fought the point, wrecking the weekend, but the Eddie who had lived through the experiences of the past couple of years only smiled and kissed his big sister good night.

“I know what you're really mad about,” Marcella said as she preceded him up the stairs, bunny slippers squeaking. “It's not America you hate. It's Junie.”

Eddie stopped. “Marcie, I adore Junie.”

“You do and you don't, Eddie. You love her, sure. But you're mad at her, too. Not for the bombings—the great Edward Wesley Junior wouldn't be worried about a few minor crimes. No. You're mad at her for not getting in touch with you all these years. For trusting other people more than she trusts you.”