New England White (5 page)

“We just flew in this morning,” Julia explained, unexpectedly apologetic. Whatever Mary Mallard’s profession, she excelled at putting people off their ease.

“I know. I expected you last night.”

“Expected me?”

At the curb, mourners were piling into their cars for the wailing trip to the cemetery. Mary Mallard fiddled with her scarf. “I only had time to collect one of the pieces. I need the other three.”

“Pieces of what?”

“The surplus.”

Julia felt like a simpleton at the genius convention, but perhaps it was the sun. “I’m sorry. The surplus what?”

“I’m a writer, Mrs. Carlyle. I’m a little surprised you haven’t heard of me.” From anyone else this would have been a pouty complaint, but Mary was only stating fact. Her fingers poked at the tangly hair, but it was hopeless. The jutting mouth gave her a comic look that Julia knew to be a deception. Mary Mallard was a very serious woman, whose clear, skeptical eyes knew you were lying before you did. “I do investigative reports.”

Julia’s tired brain finally drew the name and the face from hundreds of hours of insomnia-fueled late-night talk shows. “You do those scandal books. Who really killed JFK. The plot against Martin Luther King. Things like that. Conspiracy theories.”

“I like to take a closer look at things that the rest of the media prefers to bury, yes.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t read any. They’re not exactly my cup of—”

“Please don’t pull that Ivy League superiority crap.” Tone still calm, as if reporting the weather. Vanessa, over by the side of the church, was sneaking looks at her mother, obviously wishing she could listen in. “Kellen trusted me completely. So should you.”

“What am I supposed to trust you with?”

“Come on, Julia. The surplus. Capturing the surplus. That’s what Kellen called it.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He said the buyers’ utility functions were interdependent, and that was going to help him capture the surplus. He shared some of the surplus with me. He said you’d have the rest of it.”

Julia shook her head. “This is news to me. And it isn’t even in English.”

“Kellen had a scar on his face. About here.” Gentle fingers touched Julia’s cheek beneath the right ear. She shivered, not from the caress, but from the memory. She knew exactly where the scar was, and where it came from: her fingernails. She had been trying, with reason, to gouge Kellen’s eyes out. On television a couple of years ago, busily lying about his childhood, he had called it a souvenir from a gang war. “Just a tiny white circle. You’d hardly notice if you didn’t know it was there. But Kellen showed it to me.”

“I see.”

“I’m telling you so that you’ll trust me. I really was close to Kellen, Julia—may I call you Julia?—and we really did work together.”

“If you say so.”

“The thing is, he only gave me the photograph.” Shifting her weight, she drew a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, glanced around, then thought better of the urge. “Well, the photograph isn’t enough. It doesn’t prove anything. Kellen knew that. He said it was just a teaser. So he slept on the sofa. So what?”

Julia wondered whether she was logier than she thought, from rising so early and driving so far, or whether the journalist really was making as little sense as she seemed to. “I’m sorry, Ms. Mallard. Mary. I’m not sure what we’re talking about here.”

The ducklike mouth turned down. “Really? Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“What’s unfortunate?”

“I thought you would have the other three pieces. I’m sure Kellen said so.”

“If you would tell me what other three pieces you mean—”

Mary shook her head. “If you’re lying to me, that’s one thing. If you’re not—” She shrugged. “Nice meeting you anyway.”

“But—”

The writer had already turned away. Now she swung back. “I’m going to skip the cemetery, Julia. I’ve had as much Kellen as I can take, I think.” Bushy eyebrows drew together. “There’s just one problem. If you don’t have the other pieces of the surplus, who does?” A puzzled shake of the head. “He seemed so sure.”

CHAPTER 5

THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

(I)

F
ROM THE CEMETERY,
Julia and Vanessa made their way to a lovely Victorian bed and breakfast on North Tenth Street, to shower and change in a room of Versailles-like proportions, so sparsely but tastefully furnished it was like being outdoors. Vanessa enthused over the gold leaf on the beveled bathroom mirror, and Julia’s practiced eye labeled it nineteenth-century, Louis XVI style, probably made by hand in New Orleans, and, certainly, worth a bit of money. For a moment, she thought of offering to buy it, for antiques were her fifth or sixth love, and she knew quality. The gilding was directly on the glass—a rarely seen process known as églomisé—and the mirror included a transparent panel at the top with another gilded design painted inside. Sometimes life with Lemaster felt like gilding on glass, too: the rest of the Clan envied her perfect marriage, but Julia knew its slick, shining fragility. She peered closer. Mirrors were her thing. Granny Vee bought them everywhere she went, and the collection in her Edgecombe Avenue mansion had once been the pride of Harlem, but most of them wound up in France with Julia’s mother, who sold them piece by piece, along with anything else of value she could put her hands on, in order to write checks to organizations pledging to end war, poverty, ignorance, oppression, and hatred, preferably by next month.

Julia ran her fingers along the filigree, wondering, absurdly, if the intricate scrollwork might conceal a microphone. She had no idea why she was thinking this way; Mary Mallard must have really spooked her. Remembering her purpose, she asked Vanessa what she and the other kids had been talking about.

“Oh, you know,” she said, the fingers that now and again lived lives of their own stumbling over the fastener of the Mikimoto choker until Julia helped her. To Lemaster’s consternation, Julia refused to wear fakes, or to allow her daughters to, because, she said, the Clan would notice. “Just old stories.”

“Stories about Professor Zant?” She was still looking at the mirror, studying the lovely églomisé. The Eggameese, Vanessa had called it as a toddler, after once mishearing her mother on the telephone with a dealer, complaining that a particular églomisé was too loud, and had for a time imagined it to be a snarling night crawler who lived in her bedroom mirror:
Mommy, Daddy, I’m scared, the Eggameese was looking at me!

“About the colleges down here and stuff. History. They have really cool traditions and everything, ghosts, this killer tornado a few years ago, famous battles. Stuff like that. Did you know they evacuated the whole town in the Civil War?”

Appropriate African-American umbrage. “Probably just the white people.”

“Yeah.” Like the rest of her generation, she could not have cared less. “They have this famous park. Oh, Moms, listen.” Vanessa’s gray eyes lit up. She was speaking, as she often did when her strange brain leaped into overdrive, much too fast. “They should call it ‘A Hailed Park.’”

“Why?”

“It’s an anagram of ‘Arkadelphia.’” Anagrams being her special talent, and special love.

“You did that just now? In your head?”

Vanessa, bristling, missed the point. “Well, it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.” Her irritation faded, and the shoulders sagged again. Vanessa loved playing with words. Lemaster thought she wasted her mind on these games, but Dr. Brady encouraged them. Julia thought of anagrams as ghostly mirrors of words and phrases, some of them gilded. “Anyway, they asked me if there were any stories about where we live, and I told them all we have is snow.”

Julia’s next question came out nervously, because the Clan taught the presentation of the family to the world as perfection. To air your dirty laundry was a treasonable offense. “You didn’t tell them about…about Gina?”

Vanessa crinkled her nose and grinned. “Oh, Moms, come on. You know how Gina hates when I talk about her.”

“Right. Right. So you’ve said.” Both returned to their dressing, the daughter serenely, the mother uneasily. Julia dared not say more. She and Vanessa quarreled constantly, as adolescent girls and their mothers do, and Julia reveled in these rare moments of peace.

Gina Joule, according to one theory, was the cause of Vanessa’s peculiar mania. The other view held that Vanessa’s obsession with Gina was only a symbol, a sort of Jungian manifestation of a deeper trauma. Gina was seventeen, like Vanessa, a resident of the Landing, also like Vanessa—and her father, like Vanessa’s, taught at the university. As a matter of fact, Merrill Barnes Joule had been the beloved dean of the divinity school: another connection. Merrill Joule had even been a leading candidate for president of the university, but events had overtaken him. Gina was a shy, creative child, as Vanessa was, her only true experience with the opposite sex having begun in the fall of her eleventh-grade year: that is, about the time Vanessa had her own first date. She had Vanessa’s height, moderate smile, and slightly gangly grace, for Vanessa kept an enlargement of a newspaper photograph of Gina atop her dresser until Dr. Brady urged her, Julia begged her, and Lemaster ordered her to take it down.

Whenever Vanessa unexpectedly vanished for an hour or two, she would explain that Gina needed her, and leave it at that. True, Gina was white, and Julia had never forgotten her mother’s dictum about finding her children black friends. Gina’s skin color, however, was very far from being the largest problem in the friendship between the two girls. Nor was the largest problem that Vanessa had surprised everybody, including her teacher, with the last-minute announcement a year ago that she had changed the topic of her term paper for AP United States history—she had decided to write about Gina. No, the largest problem was that Merrill Joule had been in the ground a good quarter-century, and his daughter, Gina, had drowned at the town beach back when a stamp cost eight cents, Cokes were a dime, and Leonid Brezhnev ran the Soviet Union.

(II)

I
T WAS THE TERM PAPER
, of course, that had started all Vanessa’s problems, far too much to demand of eleventh-graders, which was what Vanessa was when she flubbed the paper and burned the car. Advanced Placement American History asked the unreasonable. So Julia believed, anyway, and, less agnostic on the matter of her daughter than on the matter of the God she professed every Sunday at the adamantly defiant Saint Matthias, she clung to this view in the face of contrary arguments by doctors, teachers, her august husband, even Vanessa herself, who insisted, a year later, that she still wanted to finish the research. The paper had earned an embarrassing C+ because, although the text was elegantly written, its use of sources, said Ms. Klein, was thin—and Julia, who had read it, agreed.

A year ago, Vanessa had been an honor student, with ambitions not unlike those of her older brother, who left high school at sixteen to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The intervening months had been painful ones for her résumé. Her test scores were still high, but, between her behavior, her arrest, and her rapidly dropping grades, the college counselors no longer knew what to counsel. Vanessa had said more than once that she would happily attend the state university, or even a two-year college, but Lemaster, the immigrant, was in matters educational a considerable snob; as, for that matter, were Julia and most of the Clan.

At the regional high school, where African Americans were less than 2 percent of the student body, Preston’s buddies had mostly been math and computer nerds, but Vanessa hung out with more marginal citizens, as Lemaster in his clever way labeled them. Her activities were eerily eclectic. History Club, coalition for animal rights, trivia bowl team. A strange, conflicted child. Loved hip-hop but sang in the medieval choir. Worked crossword puzzles and anagrams like a demon but suffered from unsuspected misspellings whenever she wrote a paper. Served as vice-president of both Young Republicans and COGS, the Coalition of Gays and Straights. She was a declared and aggressive pacifist but liked to read about war. The shelves in her bedroom sported books on famous battles, as well as plastic models of warplanes and ships built from kits and a collection of yellowing board games from Avalon Hill, unearthed at estate sales and on eBay: Gettysburg, Waterloo, Iwo Jima. Some evenings, she would walk around the house with a volume on some ancient battle in her hands, chanting like a monk from the Middle Ages. Lemaster refused to put up with it, but Julia, when acting alone, could not seem to make her stop. “It makes me happy, Moms,” the teen would insist, knowing how to make her mother bend. Julia only wished that fewer of Vanessa’s chants had the timbre of funeral marches.

At first it had been all right: Vanessa, in October a year ago, had decided to write her paper on the response in the Landing to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions in the fifties, and began dutifully putting in her time at the public library, the archives of the board of education, and, finally, the Harbor County Historical Society. Then Vanessa announced a change in her topic. No longer did the story about the fifties interest her. Instead, she had grown fascinated by the death of Gina, a loner like herself. Julia, by instinct still a teacher of teens, at once raised an objection: what thesis could she possibly craft around Gina? For Gina’s story was well known. She had disappeared one night after last being seen in the company of a black teenager from the city who, never formally accused of the crime, was coincidentally slain by police just days later, after stealing a car, an event that led to the only race riot in the county’s history. In the meantime, Gina’s body washed up. She had been sexually assaulted, police said, and had fought back.

Vanessa answered that she did not care about the thesis, she cared about poor Gina. She would say no more. The Carlyles fretted. Other AP history students over the years had found themselves enchanted by Gina’s story, but none of them—Lynn Klein warned Julia—had written good papers. Even Preston had taken a brief look, before abandoning the topic for a richer one. Julia consoled herself, and her husband, with the fact that the term paper was not due until March, and if their daughter seemed a little bit lost at sea, she was at least getting an early start on the journey back to safe land. Then Vanessa began to avoid her friends, her grades began to slip, and Lemaster, to whose immigrant sensibility the report card was everything, was ready, as he put it, to take measures.

But Vanessa beat him to it, torching the car on the thirtieth anniversary of Gina’s death, and drawing the family into its current spiral.

“I did it for Gina” was the only explanation she ever offered: to the team of psychiatrists at the university hospital, to her therapist, Vin Brady, to her parents, to her eager classmates, among them That Casey, whose interest in her never ripened beyond casual dating until after the fire.

Vanessa did finally finish the paper, although not until April, the final product every bit as dismal as her parents and her teacher had feared, for she presented little more than a handful of newspaper accounts reporting that Gina had vanished, and that the disappearance remained unsolved. “You need a stronger thesis,” wrote Ms. Klein, “and a larger diversity of evidence.”

Vanessa asked if she could do another draft. Ms. Klein said of course, but made no promises to change her grade. Seven months later, Vanessa was working on it still. Julia kept a copy in her office cabinet, in what she privately called the Vanessa File, along with the photo of Gina Joule that used to grace her daughter’s dresser. Lynn Klein did not know—nobody did, outside the family and Dr. Brady—that now and then Vanessa and Gina sat down for little chats.

(III)

T
HE HOUSE WAS TWO STORIES HIGH
, boxy and blue-shingled, on a sunny side street. Hedges were neatly trimmed, but the faded flower boxes on the front step sat empty. Half a dozen cars jammed the curb, dominated by a wounded truck that sat exhausted in the driveway. The large black dog dozing on the cracked concrete of the walk looked too old to do much guarding. Pretty curtains hung in the windows, and Julia had an instinct that they were homemade. Seth Zant sat on the top step with a Pepsi in his hand, watching Julia squeeze into the last remaining parking spot. She wondered what gift he held in store.

“You made it,” said Seth. “Good.”

“Of course we did.”

He gave Vanessa a long look. “Bet you have to beat the boys off with a stick.”

The teenager colored and dropped her eyes and could not get a syllable out. Julia squeezed her daughter’s frozen hand and answered for her. “We try to be as gentle on them as we can. We only bring out the stick in emergencies.”

Not too funny, but Seth laughed anyway, to tell them both he got the point.

The gathering was the sort that Lemaster handled brilliantly, Julia poorly, and Vanessa not at all, for the teen stayed mostly in the corner next to the punch bowl until one of the endless train of relatives dragged her into the kitchen and pressed her into service refreshing the platters of fried fish and fried chicken and barbecued ribs heaped on the dining room table. Seth Zant also did his share of dragging. Instead of passing along whatever he had invited Julia to collect, he introduced her to various people as “the great love of Kellen’s life” or “the one who got away,” until, unable to bear any more, she begged him to stop. So instead he sat her on the sofa like the guest of honor and let the others take turns sitting beside her and saying pretty much what Seth had, preceding it always with “So, Julia, I hear you were…” Everyone had a Kellen story to share.

A hefty churchwoman named Ellie, who grew up with Kellen and sounded like she might have had a considerable crush on him, described an inquisitive, impatient kid who got into lots of fights, even with children a whole lot bigger than he was, because, Julia, he had such a good heart, always going around looking to protect the weak. He did the Lord’s work, Julia, no matter what mischief he got up to once he went North. Julia nodded politely. An ancient man called Old Tim told how, back in high school, Kellen even faced down a fella with a knife who was bothering a girl at a party. “He was just in high school, Kellen, a skinny little ninth-grader, but he almost killed a man that night, and never lost a minute’s sleep over it.”