Stephen L. Carter Read online

  “Arkadelphia. And yes.” Wondering why she was blushing afresh.

  “How about our esteemed president? Showing the flag, delivering a eulogy, weeping crocodile tears?”

  “Lemaster has too much work.”

  “Too bad.” A furry grin. “Want some company?”

  “Have some, thanks.” Now in an even greater hurry to escape him.

  “Well, good. You have fun, if that’s what one does at funerals. How are the kids taking it?”

  “They’re fine,” she said, not sure whether she was lying. Should she talk about her eldest, Preston, off at grad school, who never called home if he could avoid it? About Vanessa, whose troubles could fill a book? Or Aaron, her ninth-grader, who had fled to Exeter to escape the tension in the house since his older sister’s arrest? And what about Jeannie, more determined than ever to prove herself the household’s perfect little princess? She felt all four of them drifting away from her, and the pain of loss twisted her mind in sadder directions. “They didn’t really know him,” she said, a bit faintly. “Or not very well.”

  He was already on to another subject. “Oh, listen, I’ll tell you another thing I heard about your friend Kellen. A few people out in the Landing were pretty angry with him.”

  Boris lived just a mile from Hunter’s Heights and loved to spread gossip, some of it true. Julia was intrigued, finally, in spite of herself. “Angry at Kellen? People in the Landing? What did Kellen have to do with the Landing?”

  “No idea, but, whatever it was, it sure got a lot of people’s backs up.”

  “Well, no disrespect, but I don’t see how on earth Kellen could have been doing anything in the Landing without me knowing about it. He would have told me—” Julia stopped, confused by her own words. Her colleague’s mocking eyes told her that he had spotted her error, but would preserve his teasing for a fitter time. “I mean, I would have heard about it. We all would.”

  “Unless he didn’t want you to know,” said her fellow dean, and took another messy chomp on his burger.

  (II)

  BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, two days before her lunch with Boris, the gossip-flies had already begun buzzing everywhere. No screen or spray ever suffices to keep them out. Stop answering the telephone and they arrive as television bulletins. Shut off the set and they pop up online as headlines. Get off the computer and the phone rings: in this case sugary Tonya Montez, chief Sister Lady of Harbor County, bearing the breathless news that she was listening to one of the inner-city talk radio stations a little while ago, on the way home from morning worship at Temple Baptist (Yes, by the way, I’m also more faithful than you!), and heard the host, Kwame Kennerly, proclaim that the murder of Kellen Zant proved once and for all that it was open season on the men of the African diaspora. She did not often agree with Kwame, said Tonya, which was a lie, but he was right about this one. Julia tried to get a word in, but nothing slows a Ladybug in full flutter. You wait and see, said Tonya. There’s gonna be more.

  More what? asked Julia, perhaps missing the point.

  Next came Donna Newman, whom Julia—shopping with Jeannie—encountered later Sunday, at the deli counter of the Stop Shop on Route 48. Donna, who ran half the social clubs in the Landing—the Caucasian Squawk Circle, Lemaster called them—had heard that “this Zant” was seen in town the night he died.

  “Of course he was,” said Julia.

  “I mean before you found him.” A glance up and down the aisle. “They say he was with a woman,” said Donna, ominously, but he always was.

  Then, on Monday, it was Tessa Kenner on the telephone, Julia’s roommate at Dartmouth, whom she hardly ever heard from, still less saw, other than on television, where Tessa read the news for two hours five nights a week on one of the cable networks, not because she had been Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth and a star in law school but because she possessed the principal qualification producers sought: blond hair. But Tessa had saved her life twice in the bad old days, and Julia was never quite able to hold against her what Lemaster insisted was a hopeless waste of talent.

  Tessa, as it happened, did more asking of questions than spreading of gossip, and Julia, despite the warm space her old roommate occupied in her heart, danced around the answers. They agreed that Julia should call when next in Washington, and Tessa would call if she ever passed through Elm Harbor, although nobody ever did. Then Tessa, before hanging up, asked the worst question of all.

  “And the two of you were over, right? I mean, like, really over?”

  “Of course.”

  “There wasn’t, like, any hint of any little thing?” A professional chuckle, as if laughing was a subject she had studied. “No juicy tidbit?”

  “Is that why you called, Tessa? To ask about me and Kellen?”

  “I’m not working on a story,” she said hotly, denying an accusation Julia had not made. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

  “I’m fine,” Julia lied, wondering what tales Tessa might be spreading through the higher echelons of broadcast journalism; and whether her past would come back to bite her after all.

  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)

  AFTER LUNCH WITH BORIS, 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 key
s 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)

  TO GET TO ARKADELPHIA, ARKANSAS, 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)

  LIKE 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 a
t 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.