Read Online Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter - Free Book Online Page B

pages, like school kids use? Except this page was torn out. Torn out and then stuck back in with tape. Probably just wear and tear. It happens a lot.” He saw Eddie’s face. “Hey, is there a story here?”
    â€œNo story.” But he was thinking, as perhaps the reporter was, that it would be an easy matter to tear out one page and tape in its place another, copying the list of evidence but omitting an item or two.
    â€œYou sure? Because Harlem’s part of my beat. It doesn’t get covered too much in this town. We should do better. A juicy scandal might help.”
    Eddie shook his head. He had learned at his father’s feet to mistrust the yearning for outrage that fired so much journalistic endeavor. Only many years later, when the violence was out of control, would it occur to him that by telling the story to a scandal-seeking reporter now, he might have helped avoid the worst. Instead he murmured his grave thanks and returned to Harlem.
    Margot’s wedding to Lanning Frost made all the society pages, but Eddie could not tell from the grainy photos what, if anything, she wore around her neck.

CHAPTER 6
    Czarinas in Training
    (I)
    â€œY OU SHOULD GO BACK to school,” said Mona Veazie, Aurelia’s closest friend. “When the baby’s old enough, I mean. Get your graduate degree.”
    â€œDon’t be silly, dear,” said Sherilyn DeForde. “She has a Garland and a baby. All she should do for the rest of her life is bask in it.”
    â€œActually,” said the other Garland in the room, Claire—married to Kevin’s cousin—“she should ignore the rest of us and do what she wants.”
    At which Sherilyn tittered, because she was a titterer.
    Mrs. Aurelia Garland sat regally among the other women in the plush living room of her apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue. Regal, but terrified, and, as befitted royalty, she hid her terror behind a façade of delight. She dandled the baby. Her period of laying in was over, and she was receiving for the first time since Zora’s birth. She needed to receive. She needed to be among friends. She needed relief from the endless flow of clucking relatives—none of them hers—who failed, even collectively, to compensate for the absence of her husband. She was exhausted from the work of presenting to the world the face of radiant perfection as her husband crisscrossed the country, and occasionally left it, never saying when, or whether, he planned to return.
    Sometimes the telephone would ring in the middle of the night and Kevin would leap wordless from the bed and vanish for a week. And yet he could be so sweet. He took her to sumptuous dinners. He introduced her to all the great men and women she had only heard of, because the Garlands knew everybody. They gave a party for Lena Horne. They gave a party for Sugar Ray Robinson. At a dinner on Long Island, she found herself seated beside Bob Hope. And Kevin still sang, off-key, all the songs with which he had seduced her in the first place: “It had to be youuuu,” he would croon, as they danced together in the front room. Or: “You maaaade me love youuu, I didn’t wanna do it.” One evening when Aurelia thought he was in Detroit he stepped into the bathroom as she climbed from the tub, assuaging her scream with a tender embrace and conjuring from behind his back a spray of long-stemmed roses. Two days later, he failed to come home after work, and when, close to midnight, Aurelia woke Kevin’s politely demeaning assistant, Thrush, she learned only that her husband had been called away for “consultations”—by whom, or to where, or on what, Thrush apologetically found himself unable to say.
    So she received instead. Sitting in the parlor, she gathered a few friends and sought good-natured advice on what she should do now. The weather was summer-sultry. The windows were open and the radio was on. This was in keeping