New England White (10 page)

Don’t worry?
“Will he do that? Just because you ask him?”

“Of course.”

Another problem solved: like magic, the way he did it. He kissed her briefly, turned off the television, rolled onto his side, and closed his eyes. He never answered her question about Kellen.

CHAPTER 10

A WALK ON THE BEACH

(I)

I
N THE MORNING,
Lemaster took Vanessa and Jeannie to the eleven o’clock Eucharist at the adamantly named Saint Matthias, which some years ago had seceded from the Episcopal Church in a fit of traditionalist theological righteousness. Astrid’s children slept in. Julia and Astrid went to brunch at the Landing Club, the private and pricey haven of the town’s well-to-do, which the family had finally been invited to join when Lemmie went to work in the White House. Kellen had joked that the town was betting that the family would follow Lemaster to Washington, so that the membership would never actually be used: and perhaps it was true.

“You have to make Lemaster see,” said Astrid, “that his view of the world is too narrow. You cannot live your life on the fence. You cannot evade the responsibility to take sides. The issues facing us are too vital. People of his caliber, and yours, must not be permitted to hold back.”

“Hold back what?”

Astrid played with her Grape-Nuts and soy milk. A few slices of cantaloupe completed her meal. Julia was barely able to touch her poached eggs and sausage, for fear that Astrid would be able to see the pounds adding. “The President of the United States was once your husband’s best friend in the world. In college, he got up to all sorts of mischief. Once upon a time, we might have said that the college record of a public official was not the public’s business. Those days are over, Julia. The issues are too important.” Her mantra, and, in a sense, her ideology. “Scrunchy—what an odd nickname, I would love to know how he got it—Scrunchy told his friends after college he had done terrible things in those years. Now, maybe he just meant he got drunk too often and woke up in a strange bed now and then. But maybe he meant more. We would like to find out.”
We
meaning, in Astrid’s jargon, the forces of righteousness and truth. But she was confirming Lemaster’s account. “Scrunchy would have confided in Lemaster if he confided in anybody. We would like to know what he confided. The fact that your husband is fighting so hard to keep the secrets suggests that they are secrets worth telling.”

“Or worth keeping,” Julia murmured, thinking again of Kellen, but Astrid pretended not to hear. Astrid wanted Lemmie’s secrets. Mary Mallard wanted Julia’s. Suddenly everybody seemed to think the Carlyles had inside information. She pushed images of Kellen’s two mirrors from her mind: even dead, he would
not
suck her back into his world.

The waiter asked whether there would be anything else.

“These have been terrible years for our country, Julia, terrible years. The Dark Ages all over again, if you will forgive my metaphor. Lemaster talks about honor and loyalty and keeping his word. But you cannot win the battle against evil with one hand tied behind your back.”

“I think the President would agree with you.”

Prim mouth, looking askance, the way true believers do when their faith is mocked. “This is not a laughing matter.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m seriously worried about you, Julia. You used to be much more political.”

“I think you’re confusing me with my mother.”

A couple of women Julia knew from town came over to say hello. Julia did introductions, but it was plain that nobody would remember anybody else’s name. They did little kissy things, jewelry jangling, and moved on.

Astrid watched them go. “They’re afraid I’m moving in.”

“Why would that bother them?”

“Too many of us move in and they’d have to move out.”

Julia colored, surprised into defending the Landing. “People aren’t like that here.”

“White people are like that everywhere.”

Astrid wanted to pay for brunch, probably to show off her platinum American Express card, but Julia explained that all charges went to a member’s account. Astrid tried offering cash for her share, which Julia politely refused, wanting to be in Astrid’s debt as little as Astrid evidently wanted to be in hers.

They stood on the front step, forcing diners of the paler nation to excuse themselves in order to gain entrance, a game Lemaster, at odd moments, also liked to play. Off to their right, sloping smoothly white, was the finest golf course in the county. Astrid’s flight, a puddle jumper from the Elm Harbor airport, left at four.

“We have the same problem in Ladybugs,” said Astrid, as if resuming an earlier conversation. Only it turned out she was. “At the convention in Dallas—you weren’t there, were you?—several of us offered a resolution critical of this Administration and its record. Not taking sides in the election—that would of course be illegal for a not-for-profit—but moving as close to the line as we could. Telling the truth about what has been happening in this country, and letting the Sister Ladies decide how to vote. Do you know what happened? They would not even bring it to the floor. They let it die in subcommittee. Laurel St. Jacques gave a speech about how the tradition of the organization was that we stand outside of politics. As if tradition is an argument. The older women, the ones who have been around forever, all nodded and cheered and clapped. All except Aurelia Treene, the writer—you’ve met Aurie, right? No? Well, Aurie is a gem. She has to be seventy-nine, eighty, something like that. She’s been a Ladybug, oh, fifty years. She lived in Harlem in the old days. She’s known some of these clubs since they were founded.”

Julia tried to say that she knew Aurie Treene, displayed autographed copies of her novels back home on the bookshelf, had met her through Granny Vee when still a child. But Astrid was listening only with her mouth.

“Aurie knew your grandmother. She said this has long been the curse of the best of us, and is therefore the curse of our clubs. The sororities, the fraternities, the social clubs, all of them. The best of our people reach a certain level of success, and they decide that they have moved beyond politics. One reason they become so devoted to the clubs—Aurelia said this—is because it lets them express solidarity with the community without actually having to do anything about it. They can congratulate each other on their achievements, and leave the striving for justice to those they have left behind.” During this monologue they had descended the steps. They were crossing the street, because no smoking was allowed on club property, even outdoors, except the golf course. The gutters were thick with slushy runoff. “And Aurie said something else, Julia. She told us that the worst offender of all, the club that in the old days used to have the most successful men, but the men least likely to do anything to risk their standing, was the Empyreals. Lemaster’s club,” she added unnecessarily, with an angry little bark of laughter. “The Empyreals might not be important any more, but I guess that’s one tradition they’ve stuck with, huh? Not getting involved.”

“They’re just
clubs,
Astrid.”

“Nothing is
just
anything,” she shot back, like a divinity school professor explaining Heidegger.

“What I mean is, nobody expects the Boy Scouts to be in politics. The chess club. The…the scuba diving association. People need space to relax.”

“But they are not permitted to relax for a living. Not in such times as these.”

Julia held her tongue. Arguing with Astrid was like arguing with Lemmie: the two of them stored up zingers by the bushel. Including zingers that possessed no zing.

“You’re a good woman,” Astrid assured her as they strolled toward the town beach. A sprinkling of fresh snow glistened in the noonday sun. A scattering of gulls had lingered for the season and were feeding on the sidewalk. “Lemaster could learn a lot from you.”

“I’ve learned a lot from him.”

“You are his wife, Julia. You are closer to him than anybody in the world. You have to make him see sense.” A pause, as a terrible idea struck her. “Or does he want this man to be re-elected? Working in the White House—that was just service to his adopted country, wasn’t it? Not service to the President?” She seemed to have rehearsed this argument a lot, probably with Washington friends whose judgment she had to avoid. “Surely Lemaster is not a
supporter
?”

Julia chose not to touch that one. “He’s your cousin, Astrid. Ask him.”

“He
claims
to be neutral.” A hissing sound. “As if neutrality is possible.” Rubbing her face as if in exhaustion. She was not accustomed to opposition. “Fine. If he’s not a supporter, he could prove it. He could help.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like to play dirty,” said Julia, zipping her parka tightly against the frosty air.

“It’s not dirty. It’s doing what’s necessary.”

“Astrid—”

“Or we could go around him.” Astrid linked her arm through Julia’s and put her mouth close to her ear. Now they were down to the point of their walk. “I mean, all the secrets could get out without Lemaster necessarily being the source. He wouldn’t even have to know it got out.” A confident throaty smoker’s chuckle as, with her free hand, she waved her cigarette. “And he certainly wouldn’t have to know
how
it got out.”

Julia said, distinctly, “I don’t know the President’s secrets, Astrid.”

“We have to defeat this man. For the sake of the country.”

And if Senator Whisted wins, you probably get to be White House chief of staff, don’t you? Aloud she said: “Even so, I don’t know any secrets. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know there were any secrets.”

“Well, there are. We’re sure of it.”
We:
the good guys again. “Scrunchy used to tell Lemaster everything. And Lemaster tells you everything.”

Julia’s turn to laugh. She kicked through a snowdrift in her high boots. “If that’s what you believe, Astrid, you don’t know your cousin as well as you thought.”

“He would have told you this. It’s too juicy to keep to himself.”

There are only so many times you can deny a proposition truthfully before you begin to doubt your own story. “Lemaster doesn’t tell secrets, Astrid. Period. That’s why he knows so many. He believes nothing is more important than our honor.” She shook her head, feeling oddly pathetic. She decided not to tell Astrid that she and Lemaster were going to the White House for dinner on Tuesday; although she must already know. “Lemmie always says you have to assume anybody you tell a secret will tell as many people as you told.”

“Honor?” Astrid echoed, her voice tinged with the skepticism we reserve for the discovery of a hitherto unsuspected vice.

“Loyalty. Keeping your word even when it costs. That kind of thing. Lemmie will take a head full of secrets to the grave.” Julia searched for a way to drive her point home, a way Astrid would appreciate. Thoughts of Kellen and the mirrors intruded again, and again she shoved them away. “Look. Maybe he knows Mal’s secrets, too. He’s known them both for like thirty years. Did you ever think of that? Lemaster keeps Scrunchy’s secrets, and he keeps Mal’s. That seems fair.”

But Astrid was not so easily deflected. “It isn’t the same. One man wants to save the country. The other is destroying it. Fair has nothing to do with it. There is only one moral course: you protect one man and try to stop the other.”

(II)

T
HEIR WALK HAD TAKEN THEM
to the parking lot for the town beach, small and white like the Landing itself, and, by common consent, the most picturesque and dramatic in Harbor County. Julia, as conflicted as her famous mother by the competing tugs of the exclusivity of the Clan and justice for The People, had always felt a secret dirty thrill, a delicious frisson, at the thought that residence in the Landing gave the family access to the beach about which others merely fantasized. Bathers from other towns were always trying to sneak in. Kwame Kennerly, the most popular local host on what was called in the trade urban radio, was constantly railing against the “segregated” beach. Before whatever happened to Vanessa happened, the family used to walk here after church on Sunday, even in midwinter, when the sand was hard and the water a defiant gray that secretly thrilled and frightened Julia with its implicit endorsement of eternity.

Thirty years ago, Gina Joule had drowned here.

The two women crossed the snowy parking lot beneath the low slate sky, Astrid still whispering reasons why Julia should get her husband to share whatever dirt he was hiding on Scrunchy. Today’s guard, a pimply boy, watched them incuriously. Julia offered a saucy wave, because it was always possible that he was somebody who would be offended if she failed to recognize him. He was opening a box of fudge wrapped in Vera Brightwood’s trademark green ribbon, and unless he ate less of it, the pimples would be with him for a long time. Paying a kid to guard the beach in winter struck her as a waste of money, but somebody was here twenty-four hours a day, a tradition that went back to the war—by which the town’s old-timers meant World War II—when workers from the ship foundries then located a couple of towns away used to spill into the Landing to eat lunch by the water. A lawsuit challenging the town’s policies was currently pending in the state’s highest court, the plaintiffs—including Kwame Kennerly—represented by several professors from the law school. Julia, torn afresh between her egalitarian pretensions and her innate snobbery, was not sure how she felt about the prospect of the beautiful beach, so splendid in its isolation, suddenly teeming with humanity.

Astrid, having exhausted abortion and the war, was going on about energy policy and alternative fuels, when the pimply boy stepped from the booth.

“Residents only,” he snapped, raising a hand.

Julia swung around, hands on hips, head tilted back, for she never felt quite as Clannish as she did around Astrid. “I beg your pardon?”

“Beach is closed to the general public. Residents and their guests only.” He tapped the shiny red-white-and-blue sign in case she was deaf. Usually the guards only dozed. “Town ordinance.”

“I am a resident. I’ve been coming to the beach for six years.”

“Residents and guests
only,
” he repeated, as if she had missed the point.

“Did you hear me?”

“The beach is closed.” His tape seemed to have wound back to the beginning. “Town ordinance.”