New England White (59 page)

“Lemmie, what is it? Let me go!”

“Look,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re the one who loves mirrors! Now, look!”

She turned. And there was the answer to her question, staring back at her, the secret burden theirs to share.

EPILOGUE

THE MANSION OF ALL MOODS

(I)

S
UMMER
. Julia stood in a bay window at the back of the Mallard mansion south of Portland, Maine, watching the Atlantic through gauzy curtains. Waves rolled in, dark and majestic, patiently battering the boulders that today stood proudly against the assault and, in the fullness of time, like all that seemed solid and unchangeable, would crumble to dust.

“So—what am I supposed to do now?” said Mary Mallard from behind her. She was on the sofa, her bad leg stretched along the cushions. “Publish the truth? Tell me, Julia. What am I supposed to do?”

“You don’t know the truth,” said Julia after a moment. “Neither do I.”

“We know the lies, though.”

Julia nodded, said nothing. The house belonged to Mary’s mother, and was furnished with grand Yankee bad taste. The rear lawn swept down to the seawall, where Evelyn Mallard, related to so many Presidents that nobody could count them, walked with Jeannie. Maine summer sunshine sparkled on their trim white outfits. Jeannie—no, Jeans, always Jeans now—Jeans was laughing, having found in this rich seafront colony south of Portland a whole new world worth charming with her perfection. Aaron, summering at a program down at Babson for future business leaders, had been up last weekend. Preston promised to bring Megan, or her successor, as long as Lemaster was not around, and Julia hoped he would. Smith and Vanessa had left early on their cross-country trip, because their parents lacked the will to stop them. The two (or three) of them telephoned intermittently to assure their families that they were fine.

Lemaster kept calling to say he would be up in a few days, and his new assistant kept calling to say he wouldn’t.

“I’ve worked most of it out, Julia. Jock killed Gina, Whisted was there with him that night, and poor Scrunchy was at some frat party, drunk out of his mind. He was nowhere near the beach.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s a big story, Julia. A thirty-year-old murder, a black boy blamed for it and practically lynched, and now it turns out that Senator Whisted was there when it happened. A huge story. But I can’t print it, can I? I don’t have hard evidence. I can’t print that somebody somewhere suspects that maybe it might have been, et cetera, et cetera. You know and I know, but we can’t prove a word of it.” A pause to let Julia put a word in, but Julia didn’t. The curtains snapped in a sudden sea breeze. Upstairs on the guest room desk was an unfinished letter to Julia’s mother. She had tried writing to Lemmie, too, but could not think what to say.

Behind her, Mary was still talking, perhaps to herself. “Besides, we know it’s the kind of thing they kill people over, isn’t it? I mean, really kill them. If I printed it, they’d send somebody to kill me, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

Julia remembered her conversation with Vanessa after they left Frank Carrington’s house a million years ago. “Of course it bothers me. I think every life is precious.” She nibbled her lip. “But, Mary, the thing is—”

“That’s not what I mean.” The journalist was impatient. “I meant, doesn’t it bother you that Whisted will never be brought to justice? That he might make it all the way to the White House?”

“He didn’t do it. Being asleep in the back seat isn’t a crime.”

“He was there, Julia. The voters should know that.”

Julia surprised herself with her answer. She had been in Maine the better part of a month. Needing a confidant, and realizing how much Mary had worked out for herself, Julia had shared much of the story, omitting, however the roles played by the Empyreals—and her own husband. She had not seen Lemaster in weeks. Yet here she was, channeling his argument. She remembered his hand gripping her upper arm, making her face the mirror, telling her to look at who would make the decisions.

“Let me tell you about justice,” she said. “If you could write about Mal Whisted—suppose he even did it, and you could prove it—what would happen? He’d go to prison, right? He’d get what he deserved. But where would that leave the darker nation? Why shouldn’t the darker nation have the chance to get what it deserves? Lock up Whisted, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that a man who did a terrible thing thirty years ago is behind bars. And that’s it. But leave him free to rise, maybe all the way to the White House, and you get this powerful ally to push his party in the direction it needs to go. You can give Whisted justice, or you can give African America justice. It’s as simple as that.”

“That’s not simple, Julia. It’s…amoral.”

She quoted Astrid. “You can’t win the war against evil with one hand tied behind your back.”

“Do you really think America is evil?”

“No. I think America has a short attention span.”

(II)

M
ALCOLM
W
HISTED HAD WON
the primaries. The press still loved the story of the two college roommates squaring off for the Presidency, and, in the excitement, paid no attention to various low-level resignations from their staffs. Everybody was still trying to dig up dirt, discounting the other side according to political preference:
Your guy’s military record matters! Looking at my guy’s military record is gutter politics!
Oddly, nobody seemed to consider the two men’s college years a fruitful field of inquiry—perhaps because the reporters and editors and activists had all had their own college years, and liked to think of them as comfortably, even passionately, off limits. Nobody even hinted at the perfect balance of terror, the possibility that an obscure Harlem men’s club, membership limited by charter to “four hundred colored gentlemen of quality,” held both men’s futures in its hands, because it owned evidence that each had committed a murder, evidence each man fully believed, even though neither one of them had done the deed.

Patience can be a strategy all by itself, as Lemaster liked to say—and, in this case, an Empyreal patience had won the day.

Julia had considered leaving her husband after that final confrontation, just taking the kids and going—somewhere. Her growing sense of duty held her back—duty, and, vaguely, gratitude. Lemaster was a stranger, but he had rescued her, after all, and had never betrayed or hurt her. The stern, locked-in convictions in which he bound his life did not, she had discovered, bind her equally. He lived his way and she lived hers. They could accomplish this under one roof. They could ride together through life. They had done it for twenty-one years, even with her confused and lingering feelings for Kellen between them like a sword. They could continue, and not only because Lemaster and his Empyreals gripped the reins with such fearsome and oppressive goodwill. Kellen had liberated her. Whatever his motive—justice or jealousy—his search for Gina’s killer, and his mad plan to drag Julia into his scheme, had released her instead from the prison of other people’s expectations.

She enjoyed her new job, and not only because she was away from Lemaster’s campus. She was helping young people who served, too often, as props for politicians and as applause lines for activists. Everybody sympathized with their plight and everybody avoided any more contact with them than necessary—everybody who could afford to, anyway. Julia Carlyle, raised in New Hampshire, stood in front of the tiny classroom at Miss Terry’s school in the center of the most dangerous neighborhood in Elm Harbor, sharing her knowledge for no salary to speak of, and loving every minute. She had even attended the occasional service at the House of Faithful Holiness, and come away from her encounters, if not with her cup running over, at least with a heightened sense of the desperate needs of the darker nation, and the unlikelihood that either political party, left to its own devices, would ever pay more than lip service to the moral imperative to meet those needs. Certainly in the heated presidential campaign shaping around her nobody gave any serious consideration to what should be done about race and poverty—not when there were
important
issues to confront. There were always important issues to confront. Race and poverty could come later. Maybe that was why Jesus had said the poor we would have with us always: He knew where they would rank, even two millennia later, in the list of political priorities. What Mona had said so long ago, quoting some writer, resonated more and more strongly with Julia as the weeks flew past: white people were far more interested in the equality of their wives and daughters than the equality of their servants.

That was the other reason she had not left Lemaster.

She had stayed with him because she thought he might be right.

(III)

A
T THE BEACH,
later, watching Jeans frolic, darling of the Clan, Julia sat on a towel, straw hat and sunglasses shielding her eyes, and finished the letter to Granny Mo.

Dear Mona:

I have often wondered why, with all the world to choose from, you decided to raise us in New Hampshire. I loved every minute of Hanover, but you were never truly happy. We were nowhere near anything—anything, at least, of the world that formed you and your whole generation of our people, the world to which you wanted your children, at whatever distance, to remain connected. The summers were beautiful, but the winters were preposterous. The town was wonderful, but, like all New England, white.

Now at last I think I understand. To be a great people is also to be an old people, and to be an old people is to be a people with a past. In the past are great triumphs, but also great tragedies. Wisdom is knowing one from the other—and how to keep the secrets. I think you moved us to Hanover for the winters. Time covers truth like snow. The best part of New England life is that it is a very long time before the snow melts.

Love always,

                                                                                                                                                                           
Julia

She posted the letter in the morning mail.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

R
EADERS OF
The Emperor of Ocean Park,
the novel in which Lemaster and Julia Carlyle first appeared, might remember the family as residents of a suburb called Canner’s Point, not Tyler’s Landing. For a variety of story-related reasons, I moved their house. As I explained in the author’s note to the previous novel, Elm Harbor is not a thinly disguised New Haven, although I will say again, as I said there, that the two towns share a lot of the same ghosts. The same caveat must apply to any comparisons between Kepler Quadrangle and the Yale Divinity School. And of course it should be unnecessary to add, but probably is not, that whatever events might have inspired the story, it is only a story—a “what-if”—and makes no larger claim than that.

Neither Ladybugs nor Empyreals is a real organization, nor is either based on one. Nor are their members based on any clubmen or club-women of whom I am aware. I greatly admire the ability of the traditional clubs of the darker nation to preserve their traditions in an untraditional age. The story of the Black Lady is told around Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to this day, albeit with far more emendations and additions than the bare-bones tale repeated by Vanessa Carlyle in the novel. The Internet Anagram Server may be found at www.wordsmith.org but—fair warning—its powers are quite addictive. The Web site Gainful Nonsenses does not exist.

As of this writing, Dartmouth College does not offer a Ph.D. in economics, and therefore Kellen Zant could not have done his graduate work there. I could have placed his affair with Julia at one of the other New England Ivies, but the image of Julia tramping through all that astonishing campus snow was too perfect to resist. In 2004, the Iowa caucuses were held in the middle of January, but that was too early to make my story work, so I moved them, rudely, a little later. I have also shoved around, in I hope minor ways, certain other aspects of the pace of a modern presidential campaign.

Lemaster Carlyle’s argument about how man desires to create a God who needs man’s advice is inspired in part by the discussion of Dostoevsky in David Bentley Hart’s startlingly exquisite 2005 book,
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
—although Hart is not of course responsible for any holes in Lemaster’s exposition.

I am grateful as always to my alarmingly patient literary agent, Lynn Nesbit. I have benefited enormously from the guidance and encouragement of my editors, Robin Desser and Phyllis Grann, who waited through the frustrations of the pace at which I delivered the manuscript, and protected the story against many poor choices. I would also like to thank fans of my hesitantly offered first novel, whose persistent demands for another kept me working on this one. I have also had the useful advice of the small circle of intimates who read all or part of the manuscript along the way, particularly my dear friends George Jones and Loretta Pleasant-Jones.

Finally, no words can express my gratitude to my wife, Enola, my most careful and critical reader, and our wonderful children, Leah and Andrew, the three of them truly God’s gifts in my life.

June 2006

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of
The New York Times
best seller,
The Emperor of Ocean Park,
as well as seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including
The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion
and
Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy.
He and his family live near New Haven, Connecticut.

ALSO BY STEPHEN L. CARTER

Fiction

The Emperor of Ocean Park

Nonfiction

God’s Name in Vain:
The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics

The Dissent of the Governed:
A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty

Civility:
Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy

Integrity

The Confirmation Mess:
Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process

The Culture of Disbelief:
How American Law and Politics
Trivialize Religious Devotion

Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby