Palace Council (38 page)

She went on up to her room.

(IV)

E
VIDENTLY, ALL WAS FORGIVEN,
because in the morning it was Marcella who made breakfast, not allowing her mother to lift a finger. Marie sat there beaming. Eddie ate, but only to be polite. He was baffled. His mother should not be this happy. Her husband was dead, her son was notorious, and her younger daughter was a radical bomber sought by the authorities on three continents.

Yet she was happy.

It had bothered him all weekend. He could not fathom her joy. Only as he was packing his bag on Sunday did he get it. Marcella's words on the stairs Friday night struck him like a blow. He sat down hard on the bed, remembering the note Junie had written Benjamin Mellor, still in the safe-deposit box in Washington.

No point in beating around the bush. He went down to the kitchen and asked his mother if she had heard from Junie.

Her smile was one of beatific innocence. “Goodness, Edward. I don't see how that's really possible. Do you?”

“I think it's very possible.”

“But what a risk, Edward. Why would your sister take such a risk? Don't be silly.”

Marcella followed him to the car.

“You were right, Eddie.”

“About what?” he asked, probably more harshly than he meant, but his contentment had melted away.

“It's not that Momma wants to hide the truth from you. It's just that Junie asked her not to tell.” A brief smile. “I see I have the famous writer's attention. Yes. She's heard from Junie. Junie asked Momma not to tell you, but didn't ask her not to tell me. Junie never asked me not to tell you, so I think I'm on safe ground.”

Eddie was scarcely able to control his impatience through this lawyerly digression, but he recognized that he had found, unexpectedly, an ally. Marcella was talking herself into imparting a confidence.

“She got a note from Junie, oh, four years ago. Just after Dad died. You remember how the FBI was at the funeral?” Eddie did remember. At least a dozen agents outside the church and, later, at the cemetery, with police backup, in case the former Commander M decided to break cover. “Well, just after that, Momma got the first note. She was in Pittsburgh visiting Aunt Sadie, and she came back from shopping one day and found it at the bottom of her handbag. Junie said she was sorry for everything, that she didn't want Momma to worry about her, that everything was going to be fine. That was all. Not a word about Dad,” Marcie concluded, with a hint of the old disapproval.

By now Eddie's analytical self was back in charge. “You're sure that's what she said? Not that everything was fine, but that everything was going to be fine?”

His sister nodded. “Then she sent Momma another note while you were in Vietnam.” Brief hesitation. “Somebody left it in the slot at the church for Mom's guild. It had her name on it.” Stronger. “Anyway, the second note said things were getting better, and she was happy.”

“Happy?”

“That's what the note said.” The tone suggested that Marcella found this as peculiar as her brother did. “Don't look at me. I'm just the messenger.”

Eddie considered. The first note said everything was
going to
be fine. The second said she was happy. Did that mean that whatever was going to be fine at the time of the first note had indeed
become
fine?

He said, “I know Dad's church, Marcie, and so do you. If there was a note with Mom's name on it in her mail slot, there are about twelve biddies who would have read it before anybody called to tell her to pick it up.”

“It was a day she was there.”

“Mom was at church when the note was left?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you see the note?”

“No. Momma showed me the first one. The second, well, she just told me about it.”

Eddie swayed on his feet. The lie was transparent. The second time around, Junie had not bothered with a note. She had visited in the flesh. In the midst of trouble, wanting to reassure, Commander M had gone to see her mother.

CHAPTER
53

Conversation in a Coffeehouse

(I)

I
N
J
UNE,
once more in his reportorial role, Eddie attended the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society in Chicago. Officially, he wanted to see what the true radicals had gotten up to in his absence. Unofficially, he wanted to troll for news of his sister.

The belly of the beast.

On the plane, he thought about Aurelia. Her novel had surprised him. It was a throwback to another era, almost countercultural in its celebration of patience and hard work. Just the book that would succeed in an era when Nixon was insisting that there existed a silent majority of Americans who were unimpressed by the revolution in the streets. People thought Eddie had helped her publish it, but this was not true. He had not even read the manuscript. Eddie marveled at its success. A younger Eddie, without Southeast Asia behind him, might have felt a twinge of jealousy, for although
Report to Military Headquarters
had been one of the biggest-selling books of 1968, it was fiction that defined the writing craft, and he had not produced any serious fiction in five years. The new Eddie saw matters differently. His only goal was Junie. For the current phase of his quest, avoiding any connection with Aurelia was crucial. He could not afford guilt by association. The SDS types were at this time working out a theory of the need for a revolutionary assault on “white skin privilege.” After Aurelia's novel, they would consider her reactionary.

Eddie wondered what they would consider him.

Just to be on the safe side, he gave Mindy and Zach detailed instructions on what to do should something happen to him.

“Something like what?”

“I'll tell you when I get back.”

The Chicago meeting started out bad and got worse. Speakers were shouted down. Posters were torn down. People talked about burning things down. He was astonished to discover how the left had split in his absence—not merely the armchair radicals from the activists, but, along the fringe, sharp divisions over ideological points that he doubted many of those choosing up sides fully understood. He heard a young man screaming from the rostrum about “Trotskyites” and “wreckers,” and a woman—Eddie could not tell whether they were allies or enemies—groaning about “deviationists.” On the second night, he dined with a clutch of Maoists from Stanford, but two got into a fistfight over the priority of which buildings to trash: should they begin by targeting subjects that had direct war applications, like engineering, or attack the beast's lair, as one called it, the humanities classrooms where imperialist ideology was rammed down the throats of the impressionable? Eddie sat in his hotel room and wrote in his notebook that the Nixon faction had already won. The silent majority could sit back and relax. The left was dying of its own inconsequentiality. Bad ideas, he wrote, will beat no ideas every time.

On sudden impulse, he called Aurelia up in Ithaca to say hello, but fourteen-year-old Zora answered, and said that her mom was on a date. Eddie decided not to leave his name.

(II)

T
HAT NIGHT,
doleful, he walked the Chicago streets through one of those angry Midwestern rains that strafe the land like an aerial bombardment. He stopped at a jazz club, he stopped at a bar. He listened in on the radicals with their unkempt hair down. He listened for any mention of Jewel Agony or Commander M. He heard none. Jewel Agony had been drowned in the noise of its competitors. At three in the morning, sitting exhausted at an alternative coffeehouse in Lincoln Park, where a series of poets doomed to remain undiscovered moaned into the microphone, Eddie surrendered, accepting that the convention was a dead end. He was heading for the door when he heard his own name being called.

“You! Wesley!”

He turned back into the gloom. Another unsung genius was heading for the mike. The waitresses had vanished. Marijuana smoke lay heavy upon the air, but the food had no additives.

Another call.

“Wesley!”

He found the source. In a booth near the back, a young white woman sat despondently, a roach clip in one hand, a Scotch in the other. Both hands trembled. Her hair was trimmed short, and sloppily, as if she had cut it herself. Her scruffy tee shirt displayed the American flag upside down. She possessed the painful skinniness of the badly addicted.

“Sit,” she commanded, pointing, and a chubby, earnest student with a goatee and a Tufts sweatshirt hastily made room, vanishing into the shadows.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

She took a long drag. She continued to shake. Seen close up, her face was older than he had thought.

“Not know as in
know,
” she explained with an addled seriousness. “We
spoke
once before.
I
spoke.
You
fucking sat there and
listened
like a
good
little boy. But we
couldn't
fool
you.
You're too fucking
smart.
”

Eddie sat straighter. “Sharon. You're Sharon Martindale.”

She giggled, and it occurred to him that she was either very high or very crazy, or, possibly, both. “I
was
Sharon fucking
Martindale.
I've had a
lot
of names since
those
days. I'm with fucking
Weatherman
now.” Tossing in the “f” word everywhere seemed, at the moment, the largest rebellion of which she was capable. But he knew something of her crimes, and warned himself that her madness made her no less dangerous. “Except we are going to fucking
rename
it. What do you think of Weather
Faction
? Or Weather
Underground
? Because
Weatherman
has such
connotations
of—”

She stopped and took a largish gulp of Scotch.

Eddie wanted to reach across the table and shake the answers out of her. “Junie,” he said, knowing she must be close. “Where's Junie?”

“Junie's
not
with fucking Weatherman. She wouldn't be
allowed.
She doesn't
believe
in the imminent fucking
worldwide
revolution.” Her eyes closed briefly. “We're going
underground
soon.”

“You and Junie? You were already underground.”

“
Weatherman.
Don't be fucking
dense. Weatherman
is going underground.
Junie
is already fucking
gone.
”

“Gone?” Gripping the edge of the table. “Dead?”

“She fucking left
town,
” Sharon explained, with her mother's gift for speaking as if surrounded by idiots. “She
hates
meetings and
debates. She
believes—I don't know
what
she fucking believes.
Not
in the imminent
revolution.
”

“She was
here
?”

“
Everybody
was here.”

There were so many questions he wanted to ask. About Jewel Agony. About membership and money. About who tried to kill Lanning Frost. But now, presented with the opportunity, only one query suggested itself: “Where is she, Sharon? Where did she go?”

“I don't keep
tabs
on her. I'm
not
your
sister's
fucking
keeper.
” She dipped her head, but not her screechy voice. “Security.
Compartments.
No two cells
know
each other.” Another gulp. “It's
better
for all
concerned.
”

Eddie reached over and, gently, took the clip. He put it on the table. He took the glass. “Where is she? Why did you call me over?” Sharon stared at him with her mother's crazed eyes. “What is it? What did you want to tell me?”

“We
tried
to get you to stop looking. You
refused
to stop looking. You were fucking
warned.
It was
Junie's
idea.” A hiatus as her eyes lost focus. She sounded as if she wanted to fucking shoot him. A few tables away, a man with shaggy red locks was arguing about a favorite chair. No one, he shrieked, was ever to sit in his chair again. Nobody bothered with him. Sharon coughed. Her whole body rattled. Eddie turned back. “She doesn't
like
it.” She reached for the glass. He held it away. “
Living
how she
lives.
She's fucking
tired,
Eddie. We're
all
fucking tired.”

“Help me find her, Sharon.”

“Are you fucking
nuts
? I'm no
snitch.
”

“It's not snitching. I'm her brother.”

“Well, then, let me fucking
tell
you something.
Families
don't matter. Brothers and
sisters
don't matter. Fucking
countries
don't matter. Only
one
thing fucking matters. What
side
you're on.” Sharon snatched the clip, took a long drag. “And you and your
sister
aren't
on
the same fucking
side.
”

“I'll always be on Junie's side,” he said, startled.

“Yeah, well, your
sister
has a side of her
own
now. She doesn't
believe
in the
revolution.
She said the revolution turned
rotten
.” She took her glass back, held it aloft, but no waitress came. It crashed back down as if too heavy for her shrunken arm. “I told her,
everything
is rotten. The whole fucking
world
is rotten. We have to burn it
down
and start
over. She
said, if you try to burn down the
world,
the man with the
match
dies
first.
”

“I wrote that. I wrote that about Jewel Agony, oh, four, five years ago.”

“She
knows
that, Eddie. She reads
everything
you write.” An evil little smile. “She thinks you
hate
her.”

“She what?”

“She's fucking
scared
of you, Eddie. Every time you got
close,
you drove her further fucking
underground.
”

“That's not true,” said Eddie, fighting the desperate fear that what he had thought of as years wasted had actually been years of making things worse. “I love Junie. She knows that. She's always known that.”

“Well, your dear
sister
never wanted you to fucking
find
her.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's
why
she ran
away.
Because
you
were getting too fucking
close.
”

But the obvious pain in the radical's shivering face gave the lie to her words. She was telling Eddie not what was true but what she wanted to be true. He shook his head. “I know what happened, Sharon. I know about the trial. I know you expelled her. And it wasn't just this year. Please stop lying to me. Tell me where she is.”

“I don't fucking
know
where she is! She wouldn't fucking
tell
me!”

“But you know why she left, don't you? Why she really left.”

Sharon Martindale said nothing. She shook her head.

“Please, Sharon. Look. I know you're scared. I won't pretend. I can't offer you anything. I don't have any connections. I can't keep you out of prison if they catch you. I'm asking you for Junie's sake. Not mine. I want to help my sister. You know I would never hurt her. Please, Sharon.”

He had overplayed his hand. He recognized the signs. Sharon had shrunk into her chair and was looking frantically around the coffeehouse, maybe for someone who would rid her of this quarrelsome writer.

“I remember the night the first
baby
was born,” said the radical after a moment. “She wouldn't let me fucking
see
it. She wouldn't let me come to the fucking
hospital.
She got on the
train
the
next
fucking
day
and took the baby somewhere. I never knew where. I never even found out if it was a
boy
or a
girl.
Same thing the
second
fucking time.” Eddie was about to object that Sharon was not answering his question, until he realized that she was. “Her
babies,
” said Sharon, her voice almost gentle. “She went to find her fucking
babies.
” She laughed. “What the
fuck
? If
I
had any fucking babies,
I'd
go find them, too.”

And just like that, everything was clear. Strolling back to his hotel through the same drenching rain, Eddie found himself smiling. He did not know where his sister was, but, still, he had information that Sharon Martindale did not: Junie had broken cover long enough to tell her mother that she was happy. After her fall from power, according to Sharon, Junie had left Agony to track down her children.

She had visited her mother because she had found them.

(III)

E
DDIE TOOK THE MORNING FLIGHT
to Washington. He met Bernard Stilwell at the National Gallery of Art, in front of an indifferent Goya. The two men strolled through the crowds of tourists. Eddie proposed to trade. The trouble was, he could offer nothing the federal government wanted. Stilwell already knew that Sharon Martindale had attended the disorderly SDS convention in Chicago.

“Did you see your sister?”

“If I had, I wouldn't be here talking to you.”

“You might want to do your patriotic duty.”

“My first duty is to my family.”

Stilwell grinned. “Do you want to know why you didn't see her? Because she wasn't there.”

“Sharon Martindale said she was.”

“Sharon Martindale is a drug addict. She's nuts. She's dying of about six different diseases. I wouldn't pay attention to anything she said.”