New England White (46 page)

Vanessa seemed unaware of her distress, but Julia suspected that she was concealing her perception, for this child saw everything, a fact Lemaster seemed not to understand. “Okay,” she said.

They were passing the Town Green. Light afternoon flurries had started to dance across the windshield. “Vanessa?”

“Hmmm?”

“What did Mr. Carrington tell you about the meeting?”

“He got a lot nicer after he found out I knew Stalingrad. I helped him with his diorama. He had made a few mistakes.”

“Mistakes?”

“Terrain. The name of one of the towns. The route the Sixth Army took. He had them crossing the Don
south
of Kalach, if you can believe it.”

A quick glance. Who was this precocious child? What else went on in that brain that she hid from public view? What had God wrought in this creature?

And where did
that
thought come from?

“What else?”

“Oh, he knew a lot more than I did.” Unlike most smart teenagers—or most smart adults—Vanessa was able to admit this truth with no embarrassment, perhaps because she met the species so rarely. “I learned a lot about war. He even gave me a book to read.” She held up a well-thumbed volume by somebody named Keegan. “He said I can keep it if I want.”

“Vanessa—”

“Did you know that a lot of the movies are wrong? Archers couldn’t shoot through armor, so, a lot of the time—when cavalry wore armor?—the only real point of attacking them with arrows was psychological. The impact and the noise. No real harm. Just fear.”

Frustrated by this circuitous disquisition, Julia asked, directly, “What happened at the meeting?”

“I was
getting
to that,” said Vanessa, as if it was the less important part of the conversation. “The meeting was the first selectman, and Sheriff Huebner, and Mr. Carrington, and a black man.”

“A what?”

“A black man. And he seemed to be in charge.” Julia’s face went gray, but her daughter continued merrily on. “Tall, broad across the shoulders, a little overweight. Skin almost yellow. He never gave his name, but Mr. Carrington thinks he might have been a congressman. Moms, are you okay?”

No, she was not okay. She was furious at being misled, and frightened out of her wits. But she kept her voice calm. “I told you I didn’t want you involved.”

Vanessa was tart. “If not for me, you wouldn’t know any of this.”

Maybe I didn’t want to know, said Julia, but not quite aloud. She decided to drive back to Boston in the morning to ask Byron Dennison to his face what he was doing in the Landing ten days after Gina Joule died, and, for all Julia knew, in Elm Harbor a year later, persuading DeShaun’s family to drop the lawsuit.

But the hospital called that very night, to say that Bay had fallen asleep again—for good.

CHAPTER 51

MONA

(I)

I
N THE SECOND WEEK OF
F
EBRUARY,
over the fervent objections of her husband and for the sake of her daughter, Julia Carlyle flew to Paris, where she spent the night at one of those delightful little hotels that dot the side streets, and took the morning train south for Toulouse, where Hap, Mona’s live-in companion, waited in the aging red Renault 18 GTX. He was a slumping, shuffling man in his fifties, with rounded shoulders, as if from decades of hard labor, and the cheerless when-will-it-end smile of an exhausted headwaiter. He jerked his way through the cranky five-speed manual gearbox as if it was an old enemy, making little conversation as they darted through suburbs and into the countryside, slipping through copses of trees and between endless fields. Julia was grateful for the chance to doze and watch the view and, mostly, to consider and reconsider how to approach the mother who had omitted a big chunk of the family story.

“She’ll be pleased to see you,” Hap ventured at one point.

“I bet she will,” Julia snapped, which shut him up for a while.

The house was small and ragged and stuccoed, with red tiles on the roof and red awnings covering some of the windows and metal frames from which awnings were missing covering the rest. The garden, mostly brown, was sprinkled with an unexpected snow, and she wondered if she had somehow brought it with her. The foyer was a reddish marble. So were the frayed carpet runners. Every time she visited, Julia felt she was overdosing on the color, and wished Mona would redecorate: not that there was money for such frills, because Mona, lacking the good fortune to be married to a frugal first-generation immigrant, had spent her years doling out her inheritance to anyone with a cause or a sob story or cute eyes. The house backed on the woods. Two downstairs bedrooms opened onto a walled garden where faded tiles, wobbly wrought-iron furniture, and a desiccated fountain warned you that life dried up in the end. Dying vineyards lay just over the rise. Mona had once thought to produce an income, before discovering that they yielded a particularly inferior variety of grape.

“She’ll be down in a minute,” said Hap, with an air of depleted apology. “May I offer you anything?”

“I’m fine,” said Julia, whose mother loved to make her wait.

Mona had the master suite upstairs, Hap slept in what must once have been the maid’s room next to the kitchen, and Julia would have the guest suite at the other end of the house. On the rare occasions when she visited with one or more of the children, they shared the suite, far closer to Hap than to Mona, and Julia had yet to recover from the rejection. This was her mother’s world.

Mona appeared at the top of the stairs, small and pert, wrapped in a robe, sneezing noisily into a handkerchief. She smiled an uncertain welcome, because Julia would not have made the trip for the sheer joy of familial reunion. Mona allowed the expected hug but turned away before Julia was quite ready to let go, citing as excuse whatever virus was pummeling her thin body, even if her true reason was different.

“You’ve lost weight, dear.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve put on five pounds since last year.”

“You always did keep careful track. Watching that figure of yours so hard. And the boys watched it, too.” She sneezed, then caught her daughter’s mood. “Well, you were a flirt back in those days, dear. You were. I’m not saying you’re one
now.
”

The other thing about Mona was that you never knew what angle, in her sweet, unassuming way, she might choose for her attack.

“It’s good to see you,” Julia offered, but Hap appeared with tea and crackers, protecting his beloved Mona from the burden of response. Julia went off to unpack, and sulk. Over dinner, Mona moaned. She moaned about how the proximity of Airbus was driving prices up. About how terrible it was that so many Americans were coming to town these days to “hunt” at the Safari Parc. About how the United States was the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. About how she liked the way the French did not allow Muslim girls to wear head scarves in school, and she wished America would confiscate them too, along with all the crosses and little red-white-and-blue flag pins. She moaned about everything she could think of, except the issue that had brought her daughter to France. She rambled with the nervous energy of the condemned prisoner who knows that when the words stop the reckoning begins…and swiftly ends.

Julia asked her about the old days, probing, pressing, enticing. But missed the mark.

“The Empyreals were always a very
odd
fraternity,” Mona said as she struggled ostentatiously up the staircase, delighting in her ill health. “This was back before their collapse, of course. Before the bankruptcy and everything. Oh, but they were a treat! They were limited to four hundred members nationwide. Four hundred colored gentlemen of quality is what the charter used to say. Everyone knew how exclusive they were, but they never bragged about it. As a matter of fact, dear, back in the day, members were not even allowed to admit that the group existed. They were never the most
showy
men. Never the
smoothies.
The quiet, successful types who never had a word to say at the parties.” Halfway up, voice trailing behind her like steam from the engine of memory. “I’ll tell you something, dear. I couldn’t have seen it at the time, but you know what they were like back in the day? The Empyreals? Like a quiet, sullen kid at school who isn’t in a clique and never talks to anybody and doesn’t have any friends, the kind of kid you don’t even notice until the morning he shows up with a hunting rifle and decides to make the world pay attention.”

She went to bed.

(II)

I
N THE MORNING,
they drove up to Montech to look at the water slope, which was as so often under repair, the powerful tractors sitting idle. The tractors pulled a wedge, the wedge made a huge wave of water climb the slope, the wave carried small boats, or a barge in which you could ride, seeming to defy gravity and common experience. Mona liked to tell the story of the day the rubber tires had slipped the tracks because of an oil leak, tilting the tourists on their way up the slope, and maybe spilling a few into the filthy water, but Julia, who had ridden the slide in the eighties, when Mona brought her and the baby Preston to France just after the construction was done—and just after Jay died—did not know whether to believe her mother or not. So many of her memories, especially of Toulouse, were happy ones, and for some reason Mona took unadorned pleasure in spoiling them. The slope was called by the French
La Pente d’Eau,
a name Julia loved for the way it rolled on the tongue. The whole thing remained one of the technological wonders of the world: where else could you watch water flow uphill?

If only Julia knew how to climb her mountains so easily: twenty-four hours in Plaisance-du-Touch and she had yet to get to the point.

Mona had yet to encourage her.

Hap had packed a picnic lunch, and the two women walked the forest for a while, choosing the paths on which they were marginally less likely to be crushed by onrushing cyclists. Whenever Julia visited, she expected to find that Mona had suddenly aged; only it never happened. Mona, well past seventy, possessed the same skinny energy Julia remembered from her childhood, when, in search of the right chapter of the right group of the children of the Clan, she had driven Julia and Jay all over New England: Providence for a Christmas party, Boston for a cotillion, Springfield for a junior prom. Although Granny Vee had been a serious clubwoman, and the Veazies had been in on the founding of a Greek-letter group or two, Mona had always been more a hanger-on, clinging by her thoroughly nibbled fingertips to every possible solution to the problem of raising her children in Hanover while living out her dictum that her children’s friends must be drawn mostly from the darker nation; and, despite her egalitarian pretensions, she meant what Granny Vee would have called the better half of the nation.

It was just past noon, and the tall trees stood amid tiny circular shadows like dark puddles. Julia remembered vaguely that Montech lay in a floodplain, and most of the trees were scattered in smaller copses, but here the woods were thick. The smell in the air was water and reeds. After half an hour of their nearly silent ramble through the chilly afternoon sunshine, Mona pointed to a small clearing near a still pond.

“There.”

Julia grinned, working at it. “That’s the same place we always stop.”

Her mother grinned back. “You know what a conservative I am.”

So they sat on handy stumps and ate their sandwiches and listened to hidden animals, some of them human, scurrying through the under-growth. In the distance a motor hummed, men shouted, a horn honked.

Mona said, “Something’s on your mind.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is it your Lemaster? Is he mistreating you again?”

Julia made a swatting motion, even though there was no fly. “Lemmie’s an angel, Mona. I keep telling you that. He would never do anything to hurt me.”

“I read the papers, dear. The
Herald Tribune
says that he’s on the short list for Attorney General.”

“I can’t talk about—”

“For these people. He’d actually work for these people. I don’t think I’ll ever understand people like him.”

Black people like him, she meant, echoing Astrid.

Julia leaned back, hands on the wood, tipped her face upward to feel the sun, wondering if God was up there, or out there, watching, listening, already knowing how it turns out in the end. She found Mona easier to bear when she did not have to gaze into those tiny, dark, loving, pleading, righteous, crazy, hurtfully helpful eyes. “I won’t discuss Lemmie with you, okay? I won’t.” Firm, but careful not to raise her voice to her mother, on the off chance that the Ten Commandments might be true. “That’s not why I’m here, Mona.”

“Then why are you here?” Plaintive. “What do you want? You always want something.”

“Mona—”

“It’s true, dear. There just always turns out to be an agenda. I know, I know. You just want advice. You’d think you didn’t have any friends to talk to.”

A breeze plucked at the sleeve of her heavy jacket. Julia tried not to bristle. Mona did not actually believe any of this; she simply wanted her daughter to reassure her: Yes, yes, I value your advice specially. But Julia had tired years ago of flattering her mother. If her presence in France, as her confused family suffered back home, was not proof enough of Julia’s devotion, she had none to offer.

“I just want to talk, Mona,” she said, all but strangling on the intemperate words held forcibly in her throat. She found herself still unable to come to the point. “Can we do that? Just talk?”

“We are talking,” said Mona, touching her daughter’s knee. “Isn’t this talking?”

“No, Mona. No. You’re doing what you always do. You’re talking. I’m supposed to sit still and listen.”

“Well, excuse me.” Wounded, putting a hand to her throat. “There’s no need to shout at your mother.”

“I’m not shouting.” But she had been, for Mona had intentionally provoked her. Every conversation with the great Mona Veazie was a minefield of righteousness through which you crawled at your own peril. Usually you could survive if you just did not touch American politics. If you stepped on that particular trigger, the world exploded.

“Raising your voice, then.”

Julia rushed on, to forestall the likely litany of complaints, all the little ways Julia, who still mailed her two thousand of their precious dollars every month, had hurt her over the years. “Mona, please. Listen. I need to ask you some questions.” The next words came hard, but she knew what peace with her mother demanded. “I need…I need your help. It’s about Vanessa.”

Mona’s smile was brilliant, and satisfied. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

(III)

“I’
VE TOLD YOU
and told you, you’re too hard on that girl,” Mona interrupted once she had, or thought she did, the gist of her daughter’s inquiry. “You shouldn’t be raising her out there with all those white kids to begin with. I’ve told you, if the race is going to survive, each of us will have to have—”

“More black friends than white friends. I know, Mona. I know.”

“But you’re not doing anything about it, are you? Vanessa’s friends are all white, aren’t they?”

“Not all—”

Mona’s eyes glittered with satisfaction. “I know. I know. She does Jack and Jill, she used to do Littlebugs, there’s some black kids in that church of yours. She told me, dear.” Raising a small hand to ward off the objection. “But they don’t count. They’re not her good friends. Her good friends are white kids from the high school.”

“It’s the same way you raised me,” Julia snapped, hot and, as her mother probably intended, distracted.

“And you shouldn’t be repeating my mistakes,” Mona counseled, very pleased.

For a moment they fought without speaking. Julia prodded the picnic basket with her toe. Twin cyclists zipped past—male and female, she thought, but the glimpse was brief, mostly of dark hair flying beneath bright helmets. Down near the canal, children were laughing. The day had started clear and fine but was beginning to cloud over; or perhaps it was only her mood that was changing.

“Mona, listen to me, please,” said Julia at last, not looking at her mother. “Yes, I’ve made mistakes with Vanessa. With the others, too. But I don’t want to talk about my mistakes. Not today. I want to talk about history.”

“History?”

“I ran into your friend Aurelia Treene last month at the Grand Cotillion. And do you know what she told me? That my husband was Bubba of the Empyreals, and she said he was carrying on the family tradition. But Lemaster’s a first-generation immigrant. So she must have meant the Veazie side of the family.” She paused. “Tell me, Mona. Was Grandpa Vee an Empyreal? Was Preston Veazie maybe even, ah, the Bubba of the Empyreals?”

Her mother laughed. “Why, yes, dear. He was.”

“And when were you going to tell me?”

“I’m not sure it’s ever come up in daily conversation. I wasn’t hiding it from you,” Mona hastened to add. “There just was never a reason to discuss it.”