New England White (4 page)

Later that evening, as snow whirled, dervishlike, outside every window, Mona called from France—Mona, who never talked on the telephone, because she knew hers was tapped!—to make sure her daughter was bearing up as poorly as she expected, and also to ask whether she had heard this story that Kellen was some kind of fascist, a turncoat who worked for murderous American-supported dictators all over the world.

No, Julia told her mad mother. She had missed that one. But Kellen was an economist, she said, so she kind of doubted the story. And, by the way, how are you?

“Well, all I can say is, I’m
so
glad you didn’t marry him.” As if he had ever asked.

Mona had never approved of Kellen, just as she had never approved of Lemaster, neither of them really quite one of
us,
dear—the one too poor and the other too dark—just as she had never approved of her daughter’s decisions to raise her children in the suburbs (where their friends would be white) and to take the job at the divinity school (because God was dead). Pressed, Julia probably could not have come up with an aspect of her life with which her mother was pleased; but, as so often, the distaste was mutual, the two of them locked forever in the prison of the animosity formed back in Julia’s adolescence, when Mona said it was none of her children’s business which of her several boyfriends was their actual father, or whom she married, or how often.

“Thanks for calling, Mona. It’s great to hear your voice.”

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone, Julia Anne”—what Mona called her when annoyed.

“Come for Christmas.”

But the invitation brought only a lecture on why it was wrong to celebrate holidays so hegemonic and culturally exclusive. Thanksgiving, too, arriving next week, took its knocks. The United States of America, Mona reminded her daughter sternly, was the source of most of the world’s misery, and to offer thanks for the blessings of a nation built on slaughter was not piety but hypocrisy. She said much the same in the steady stream of feverish letters still duly published by the various journals and newspapers whose editors remembered who Mona Veazie was, or once had been.

“Oh, right. I’d kind of forgotten.”

“You can take that tone with me all you want, Julia Anne. But you can’t change the facts. Your Kellen was dirty. He was a fraud. All he cared about was money.” A pause, but the awaited contradiction was not forthcoming. “It’s true, dear. You’ll see.”

“He wasn’t my Kellen,” said Julia, although, once upon a time, he was.

(III)

A
FTER LUNCH WITH
B
ORIS,
she headed not back to her office but to the parking lot, because she had to see her dentist about the tooth she chipped in the accident. She panicked for an instant when she could not find the Escalade, and then remembered that it was in the shop for a new dashboard, air bags, and bumper. She had come to work in the reliable old Volvo wagon, copper-colored and medium rusty, manufactured back when doors unlocked with keys and air bags were a mysterious luxury. From the day she earned her license to the day she torched the Mercedes, Vanessa had been the principal driver of the wagon. Now Vanessa was not allowed behind the wheel. Julia hesitated before climbing in. The lot was overcrowded: the divinity school shared it with the Hilliman Social Science Tower, the hideous glass-walled monstrosity on the other side of Hudson Street, which ran like a river separating the two ways of explaining the world. Invited a couple of years ago to lecture at Kepler on the separation of church and state, Lemaster had argued that the divinity school should be “an island of transcendent clarity in a sea of secular confusion.” She had made the mistake of repeating the line to Kellen, who had laughed.
Every discipline thinks it’s a clever little island with exclusive access to the truth, Julia,
he had scolded her.
All that makes the div school different is that not even your own graduates agree.

Twenty-odd years since Kellen suddenly blurred and burdened. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of motherhood, fourteen here in the city, and the past six in the Landing. They had built their ostentatious house with Lemaster’s consulting income and a good chunk of her inheritance from Granny Vee. Now, with Lemaster six months into the presidency of the university, they were preparing to move to the ancient mansion she could just see, beyond the scaffolding, farther down the hill.

It occurred to her that the mansion, too, stood in the shadow of Hilliman Tower.

Julia gazed at the winking green glass. Kellen’s spacious office had been up there, on the sixth floor of Hilliman, where the movers and shakers sat, looking down on everybody else, for Hudson Street ran downhill toward the Gothic sprawl of the campus proper. She had never mentioned to a soul that she could see Kellen’s window from her first-floor office, but suspected he knew. She had trained herself not to look too often. But she looked now, wondering what the economist could possibly have been doing in the Landing to get people’s backs up; and why he would hide it from her, when, ordinarily, he telephoned on the flimsiest of excuses.

“Excuse me, miss. Are you moving? I’m a little bit stuck here.”

She turned. Behind her, a fortyish man waited impatiently, holding the door of his BMW. She recognized him: a famous anthropologist, always on PBS, and a political activist of some note. His tone said he had no idea who she was, or why she was crowding the faculty-only parking lot with her ancient Volvo. If black men were barely noticed on Ivy League campuses, even by the most liberal of their colleagues, black women were invisible. Julia’s mad mother, back when she was teaching at Dartmouth, would have taken the time to lash the professor with the rough side of her tongue, after which she would likely have taken him to bed, because she had a thing for white men in general and intellectuals in particular. But Julia at the moment had no thing for anybody.

“Sorry,” she said, and climbed into the car.

CHAPTER 4

MARY

(I)

T
O GET TO
A
RKADELPHIA
, A
RKANSAS
, you fly into Little Rock, rent a car, and drive pretty much forever, sharing the turnpike with logging trucks and Wal-Mart trucks and construction trucks and produce trucks and those nameless, faceless behemoths that roar up behind you in sudden demand, commanding you to accelerate or clear the way or preferably both, then roll on past you in majestic anger, on eighteen, twenty, it sometimes feels like fifty wheels, the wash of air striking your poky little rental like a thunderclap. Bumper stickers proclaim that the right to bear arms will be the last to go. The radio preachers are louder than you remember from when last you tuned in. There is no obvious speed limit. You pass signs advertising churches, and statues advertising churches, and brightly lighted crosses advertising churches, and most of the signs bear pictures of American flags as well, and an awful lot are indistinguishable from the many banners cheering on the Republican Party, and eventually it dawns on you that you are not anywhere near New England any more.

Julia Carlyle, feeling oddly liberated, would ordinarily have viewed all of this in fascinated absorption, because her undergraduate training as a scientist made observation natural to her. But just now she was distracted, still working through her emotions about the sudden death of a man toward whom she had felt, once upon a time, passionate desire, murderous rage, and most other emotions in between. She had met Kellen when she was barely Vanessa’s age, a freshman at Dartmouth. A younger and less distinguished and sinfully attractive Kellen Zant, at that time a graduate student, was serving as a teaching assistant for Econ 101. Julia dropped by his office one afternoon for help on drawing indifference curves, and, as Granny Vee used to say, dreaming soon led to doing.

“You there, Moms?” asked Vanessa, beside her in the front seat of the rented Sable, lovely brown face with its long, expressive bone structure eerily placid behind the spray of chattering beaded braids.

“Hmmm?”

“You’re not supposed to daydream while you’re driving.”

Julia knew her daughter was half teasing, half complaining, for she had not been behind the wheel of a car since February, or not that her parents knew. Granting her request to travel to the funeral had been Vincent Brady’s bright idea, in order, he said, to bring mother and daughter closer together. Her father had opposed the trip, but the three of them had worked on him. In the end, they had not so much worn Lemaster down as given him what he needed most: somebody to blame in case things went awry. As for missing a couple of days of school, Vanessa was smart enough for her absence not to matter, yet marginal enough for her absence not to be noticed.

Perfect Jeannie was sleeping over with friends, a luxury not currently on what Vanessa called her permission list.

“I’m not daydreaming,” said Julia, pulling into the right lane to allow a double trailer rig to rumble past. Scudding clouds made the sky’s faint blue seem far away. The warmth was an unexpected treat. “I’m just thinking.”

“About Kellen?”

“I think you mean ‘Professor Zant,’ honey.”

“Whatever.”

Julia almost stopped in the middle of the expressway. “No. Not
whatever.
It’s a matter of—”

“Respect for my elders. I know.” Vanessa’s window was rolled down, and one arm lay along the sill. She wore a dark-blue dress and pearls, but persuading her had been a chore: had her mother allowed it, the teen would have worn jeans and clogs. Vanessa reveled in her own eccentricity. Last fall, until they caught her, she had twice managed to sneak off to school with her clothes on backward and inside out, an idea from some song, as a protest against conformity. “Moms? Did you respect him?”

“Respect him? Kellen?” Here was a new question.

But her daughter, chuckling, gave her no chance to think it through. “I think you mean ‘Professor Zant,’” Vanessa said. “Anyway, I don’t think he was all that respectable.”

“Come on, honey, you hardly knew him.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve heard how you and Dads talk about him.”

Lemaster, Julia told herself as she spotted the exit. Not me. Lemaster. I would never discuss Kellen in front of the children. But another part of her knew that over the past twenty years hardly a day had passed when Kellen Zant, restless, delightful, alluring, indulgent, amoral, had not claimed a secret corner of her thoughts.

(II)

L
IKE THE EXPRESSWAY
, the small city of Arkadelphia is mostly churches. Not literally, perhaps, but a first-time visitor must be forgiven for gaining that impression, for one seems to stand on every corner, and if most are home to evangelical congregations, the major denominations are also well represented.

Guided by the NeverLost system in the rented car, Julia rolled past grand Victorians and cookie-cutter raised ranches and dwellings so small they might as well be called shacks. On the stoops of the shacks sat the city’s unsmiling poor, depressed and overweight, black and white alike. Caucasian poverty was another America in which she had little experience.

To reach the church, she passed a warehouse, squeezed down a narrow side street, and made a sharp left at a red brick elementary school. The building was small and neat and wooden and whitewashed, the mourning rambunctious and weepy. The casket was closed. The scatterings of family sat in the front, pride of place given to Seth Zant, the tireless uncle, hero of every story Kel told of his childhood. That Kellen never knew his father provided a common pain about which he and Julia used to talk, for he lacked Lemaster’s abiding faith in the plain virtue of withholding the deepest sufferings of the self. Kellen’s teenaged mother died of an overdose, and Seth came into his life. The unlettered auto mechanic, along with his late wife, Sylvia, had raised the remarkable boy, who set records all through grade school. The family relation was distant. Kellen was languid and lanky, with the easy grace that some possess as a gift and others envy all their lives. Seth was squat and wide, built close to the ground, as if to improve his chances at survival in a cruel world. His shiny Sunday suit was of uncertain age, but proudly worn. Aunts and cousins adorned the rest of the pew. Nadia, Kellen’s ex-wife, sat one row back, strawberry-blond hair marking the spot, some sort of computer maven in Silicon Valley, clutching the hand of a sullen boy of perhaps ten who had to be the son of whom Kellen often spoke, but whom Julia had never met. Nadia and Kellen had wed at Stanford, where he taught for five years. The marriage had been brief, lasting only as long as it took Kellen to find a job back east, for settling down was never his way; Kellen being Kellen, the inventor of Zant-Feldman, every economics department in New England made him an offer. He chose to move to Elm Harbor, and Julia chose not to wonder why.

“Moms,” said Vanessa, mouth almost touching her ear. They were in a pew near the back, wanting not to intrude, although Julia knew Seth had seen her. The small building was no more than half full, but the noise shook the rafters. Having worshiped for the past decade at an austere and traditionalist Anglican congregation, Julia was unprepared for either the length or the enthusiasm of the service. The pastor, a thick-chested man with a limp, had been speaking for what seemed hours, dragging his bad leg as he galloped back and forth in the front of the church—there was no altar, or not as Julia had come to understand the word—and the congregation supported him with loud hallelujahs and amens. There was piano and singing and clapping. A couple of the women held tambourines and used them, constantly and inexpertly. A couple of relatives fainted. Not exactly the Clan at prayer, but Vanessa got into it, up on her feet swaying and clapping and singing even when she knew none of the words. Julia had forgotten how joyous faith could be; or perhaps she had never known, for the divinity school where she had once studied and now worked lived out its days in a fog of ideology and historical-critical methodology, unaware that such excitement over God existed, except as an irrational adjunct, as it was thought on campus, to Republican Party politics.

“Moms!” said Vanessa, louder this time.

“Keep your voice down, honey. What is it?”

“Look.”

“Look where?”

Vanessa stretched a slender arm to point past her mother, toward the only white mourner not related to Nadia, a fierce-looking woman with a thick tangle of black hair, and an expensive scarf so sloppily knotted that Julia guessed the woman had donned it in a moving vehicle and made the funeral with minutes to spare: although in truth she had been there when they arrived.

“What about her?” said Julia softly, trying for the sake of politeness not to peek too obviously. The woman seemed terribly angry, as if her day had gone terribly wrong, but tying your violet Hermès silk scarf in a car, poorly, will tend to do that.

“She didn’t like him very much.”

“She what?” Two pews ahead, a stout dark matron in elaborate Sunday hat turned and glared. Julia cringed. “And keep your voice down.”

“Kellen. She hated Kellen.”

So did every other woman he ever dated, or tried to. “Professor Zant or Mr. Zant. How can you tell that?”

“Look at her face, Moms,” murmured Vanessa, who possessed her mother’s talent for reading other people, and her father’s certainty that you had to be most kinds of fool to disagree with the conclusions of so brilliant a brain. “That’s not missing somebody. That’s checking to make sure he’s dead, so you don’t have to kill him all over again.”

“Come on, honey. Why would she be here if she hated Kel—Professor Zant?”

Vanessa continued to stare, ignoring her mother’s commands to stop. Twice she seemed about to explain. But, nine months after the fire, there remained moments when, for all her charm and chatter, Vanessa got tangled in the whirlwind of her peculiar mind and could not manage her intended words. She dropped her sharp chin, settled back against the worn polished pew, and shut her eyes in confusion, even if it looked like prayer.

(III)

O
UTSIDE,
in the sunshine, flowing from one group of chattering relatives to the next, never identifying herself beyond her name and the claim of being an old friend, Julia lost sight of her daughter. Vanishing was among Vanessa’s specialties. Vincent Brady described the habit as natural, born of a need for control and independence, but Lemaster said she was obstreperous. Julia refused to panic, reasoning that the girl could not go far in an unfamiliar town, and made her way over to Nadia to offer condolences. The ex-wife had hard golden eyes. Whatever her politics back home, she was exhausted from so much exuberant blackness. Julia perceived at once that the woman did not need another hug, and so shook her hand instead. Nadia, upon hearing the name, grew chilly and dismissive. Kellen and Nadia had not even met back when he had whatever he had with Julia, and yet the woman looked ready to fight. Julia wondered what Kellen had told his wife, and when. A part of his charm in a woman’s life was that you always believed what he said; a part of his terror was that you always knew you shouldn’t.

Julia spoke briefly to rugged Seth, who asked her to come to the house later on: “I got something Kellen would of wanted you to have.” He gave a ferocious wink that promised to make the visit worth her while. Now she knew where Kellen had learned it. “Dress casual.” Turning, Julia saw Vanessa around the side of the church, laughing easily with a bevy of kids her own age and younger, Nadia’s scrawny son among them. Whatever Vanessa was saying had the boy smiling. Julia smiled, too. People always adored her daughter on first meeting and even second, but that third one could be a mess. Her smile faded as she remembered the precocious child who had loved piano and ballet and Sunday school, who devoured books of word games instead of sweets, whose special smile was reserved for her mother alone. Then, although she tried to resist, her mind skipped to the terrible night last February when Vanessa burned the Mercedes.

Lemaster had been out of town as usual, and Julia had to face the early hours without him. The first officer on the scene, a baby-faced old man of thirty who had never seen anything like this in his life because the Landing had no crime to speak of, asked Vanessa what she had done and why she did it, not the way the courts prescribe, and surely inadmissible, but never mind, the case would never go to trial. The former straight-A student, by then somewhere in the B-minus range or worse, shrugged her slim shoulders, never quite looking at him, and said, voice dull with lost hope,
Why not?
Then, gazing at the conflagration, blood smudging her wrists, the hint of a smile tugging at her lips, she added,
Isn’t it the most awesome thing?
At the hospital, they strapped her down for two days, trying one sedative after another until they got the dosage right. Waiting for her husband to return, Julia sat in the corridor with a Sister Lady or two, listening as Vanessa begged for somebody, anybody, to please, please come and kill her.

“Julia?” said a soft voice. “Mrs. Carlyle?”

Relieved at the distraction, she swung around, and found herself face-to-face with the wild-haired woman who had sat near them in the pew. The anger had vanished, but the redness in the stranger’s sallow cheeks proposed that it was on call twenty-four hours a day. The Hermès scarf was if anything more crooked than before. She looked to be about Julia’s age, and her bearing suggested that she had seen a lot of life.

“Have we met?” said Julia, with her mother’s hauteur, because strangers had no entitlement to use her first name. “Ms.—uh—”

“Mallard,” the woman said, and indeed she displayed a birdlike fussiness, mouth flaring as though she might at any moment quack, satiny hand brushing Julia’s like a feather. “Mary Mallard.”

“How did you know Kellen?”

“You mean, what am I doing here, given that I’m white?” Julia blushed, and there turned out to be space on Mary Mallard’s ducklike countenance for a smile after all. “I’m not one of his women, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, no, we were working on a project together. We didn’t finish. Too bad.” A lift of the long flat chin. “You missed the wake.”