Free New England White by Stephen L. Carter Page B

president, and the fact that said president lived in Tyler’s Landing. Ignoring this intelligence, Julia snapped out her cell phone to call Wendy Tollefson, at whose house Lemaster had arranged for Jeannie to spend the night: Wendy, who adored Jeannie, being a friend of Julia’s from her teaching days. She had no children of her own, and often stayed at Hunter’s Heights to look after the girls when both adult Carlyles had to be out of town.
    Jeannie asked could she please sleep over anyway, they were playing Monopoly.
    Flew had brought a Land Rover owned by the university, for greater traction in the snow, and Julia, in her dudgeon, climbed with Vanessa into the back seat, perhaps to remind him that he was really a glorified chauffeur. She was not mad at Mr. Flew, she was mad at Lemaster, but he was not around to be kicked, so she kicked his aide instead. She hated this side of her personality, wanting to be as warm and informal in everyday life as most people thought she was, but a part of her inheritance from Mona was a need now and then to display her Clannishness—especially around members of what Lemaster’s fraternity, the Empyreals, liked to call members of the paler nation.
    “Are you hungry?” said Flew from the front as the car ticked through the snow.
    “No,” said Julia.
    “Yes,” said Vanessa.
    “I have a little something waiting for you at the house, or we could stop on the way if you like. There’s fast food, of course, and there’s also a lovely seafood place—”
    “I’ve lived in the county since the early eighties,” Julia interrupted. All the way back to when Kellen nearly killed her. “I know where the restaurants are.”
    The little man’s mood was impossible to shake. Friendly blue eyes met hers in the mirror. “Isn’t it amazing, Mrs. Carlyle, how, no matter how much we know about something, we can always learn something new?”
    Julia colored, then colored some more, aware of Vanessa’s bemused scrutiny behind supposedly sleeping eyes. Unable to work out a suitable riposte, Julia apologized for her bitchiness, assuring Mr. Flew that he was not to blame even as he assured her he was not offended. She watched the scenery for a while, feeling deserted and lonely, as she often did within the shell of her dutiful marriage. Lemaster preached constantly on the primacy of obligation rather than desire in moral life, and Julia often wondered, but never dared ask, whether he might have in mind his relationship with his wife. Was there something he would rather be doing instead? With someone else? She did not believe he had cheated on her in twenty years of marriage, but one never knew for sure. Her college roommate, Tessa Kenner, had been married briefly to a black man, a historian of some note, who had treated her badly. Tessa, in those days a law professor rather than a television anchor, had forgiven him readily, almost happily, for what she called his peccadilloes, explaining once to Julia, over coffee, that this was simply a need all black males possessed, born of centuries of racial oppression, to liberate themselves from the repressive strictures of bourgeois sexual custom.
    I’m sure you have the same trouble with Lemaster,
Tessa had murmured with the quick, sloppy racial judgment of the white intellectual, holding her cup in both hands, the way people did in television commercials and nowhere else.
    I most certainly do not.
    Tessa had nodded, blue eyes full of pity at the romantic self-deception of so many women who, if only they saw the world unadorned and authentic, would toss off the shackles of tradition and false consciousness and build something thrilling and new.
    “You can be such a bitch sometimes,” said Julia, maybe to Tessa, maybe to herself, maybe even to Mona, because she had been dreaming and now snapped awake as the Land Rover hit the gravel of the long driveway up to Hunter’s Heights. She blinked and glanced around. Vanessa was still out, for real this