New England White by Stephen L. Carter Page B

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.