The Emperor's Children Read online

  Roger’s blithe torrent grew murkier to Danielle with each sip of claret, and she pasted her smile—quite genuine; she was enjoying herself, and lord knew it wasn’t effortful—in permanence upon her face. She smiled while slurping the inky noodles, while dissecting the antennaed prawns. She felt as though she smiled even while chewing the rather tough emu fillet, plucking the dense slices from their bed of bloodied polenta. She smiled while glancing at Ludovic Seeley, who did not glance back, and smiled at Moira, at Lucy, at John in turn. When Roger went to fetch the dessert—“I do the wine, my dear, and the clearing up. The fetching and carrying. And I make the meanest risotto you’ll ever taste, but not tonight, not tonight”—Danielle turned to Ito/Iko and learned that he was twenty-two, an apprentice in a fashion house, that he’d known Gary eight months, and that they’d recently had the most fabulous holiday in Tahiti, “very Gauguin, and so sexy. I mean, the people on that island are so sexy, it’s to die.”

  “Is that where Captain Cook got killed, in the end?” Danielle asked, feeling very culturally au fait to be dropping the founder’s name.

  “Oh no, doll, that was Hawaii. Very different vibe altogether. Totally different.” Ito/Iko flashed a broad smile and fluffed at his hair, which was, she decided, slightly tinted with blue, and glistening in the candlelight. “You haven’t been here very long, have you? Because everyone knows it was Hawaii. I mean, I know it was Hawaii, and I dropped out of school at sixteen.”

  After the meal, the party resettled in the living room, where Ito/Iko curled under Gary’s arm like a chick beneath a hen’s wing. Danielle gratefully abandoned her wineglass at the table, and sat sipping water as movement and general conversation buzzed around her in a pleasant fog. She felt a thrill of alarm—of life—when Ludovic Seeley took the armchair to her right.

  “What takes you to New York?” she asked.

  He leaned in, as she’d seen him do with Moira: intimacy, or the impression of it, was clearly his mode. But he did not touch her. His shirt cuff glowed against the plum velvet of the chair arm. “Revolution,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m going to foment revolution.”

  She blinked, sipped, attempted silently to invite elucidation. She didn’t want to seem to him unsubtle, unironic, American.

  “Seriously? Seriously, I’m going to edit a magazine.”

  “What magazine is that?”

  “The Monitor.”

  She shook her head.

  “Of course you haven’t heard of it—I haven’t got there yet. It doesn’t exist yet.”

  “That’s a challenge.”

  “I’ve got Merton behind me. I like a challenge.” Danielle took this in. Augustus Merton, the Australian mogul. Busy buying up Europe, Asia, North America. Everything in English and all to the right. The enemy.

  Lucy, bearing coffee, appeared suddenly, tinily, before them. “He’s done it before, Danielle. He’s a man to be afraid of, our Ludo. He’s got all the politicians and the journos on the run in this town. The True Voice—have you seen it?”

  “Oh. Moira told me about it. I mean, she told me about you.”

  “We don’t see eye to eye on pretty much anything,” Lucy said with a conciliatory smile at Seeley, touching her delicate hand with its black nail polish to his lavender shoulder. “But my God, this bloke makes me laugh.”

  He bowed his head slightly. “A true compliment. And the first step on the road to revolution.”

  “And now you’re going to take on New York?”

  Danielle’s skepticism evidently made him bristle. “Yes,” he said clearly, his gray eyes, their hoods fully retracted, now firmly and unamusedly upon her. “Yes, I am.”

  Danielle rode home in the backseat with her eyes shut for most of the way. She opened them periodically to glimpse flashes of the city, the sulfurous lights on the asphalt and the marine sky. “Roger certainly loves to talk,” she said.

  “Did he tell you about his novels? Bore you senseless with unwieldy plots?” Moira asked.

  “No, scuba diving. And the wine route. Better than that Asian guy.”

  “Gary’s new boyfriend? He seemed sweet.”

  “Sweet?” John scoffed. “Sweet?”

  “He was sweet. No, he really was. But not very interesting.”

  There was a silence, during which Danielle longed to ask about Seeley but did not want to seem to care. Of the evening’s underwater blur, Seeley was all that stuck out.

  “Did you talk to Ludo at the end?” asked Moira.

  “Ludo, is it now?” John said. “My dear, aren’t we grand?”

  “Is he really a big deal?” Danielle hoped her voice was neutral. “He seemed a little creepy, or something.”

  “He’s moving to New York, you know,” said Moira. “He’s been hired in to launch a mag—they sacked the first guy, you may have read about it. Merton thought his vision was wrong—Billings, was it? Billington? Buxton, I think. Big scandal. Makes Seeley the chosen boy, plucked from halfway across the world. He’s going sometime very soon.”

  “Next month,” Danielle said. “I gave him my e-mail. Not that he’ll need it, but in case he’s at a loose end. Trying to be neighborly.”

  “That’s a good one,” John said. “Seeley at a loose end. That I’d like to see.”

  “Think he’ll succeed?” Danielle asked.

  “He thinks so,” said Moira. “In fact, he knows so. But he doesn’t give much away, so it’s hard to know what he’s really plotting. And it’s hard to know whether he’s running to something or running away. He’s made such a splash here in the past, what is it, five years—Christ, he’s only what? Thirty-three? Thirty-five? A baby!—and he’s got a lot of friends—”

  “And a lot of enemies,” said John.

  “And I just don’t think there’s any challenge for him here anymore, that’s all. But a ton of hassle. With this kind of backing—jeez, Merton’s choice!—he probably reckons he’ll conquer New York, and then the world.”

  “Like Kim Jong Il, eh? Or Saddam Hussein?” said John.

  “Well, it might not be as easy as he expects,” said Danielle, thinking herself surprisingly witty in spite of the quantities of red wine. “It may just be a case of ‘our chef is very famous in London.’”

  “That it may,” John said, obviously satisfied at the thought. “That it may.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bootie, the Professor

  Bootie?” Judy Tubb yelled, in her housecoat at the bottom of the stairs, washed in the dull, pearly light of the reflected snow outside. “Bootie, are you going to come down and help dig us out, or what?”

  Met by silence, she set a foot upon the creaking step, her hand on the polished wooden ball at the banister’s base, and started, as loudly as she could, to climb. “I said, Bootie? Did you hear me?”

  A door opened and her son ambled into view on the gloomy landing, pushing his glasses up his nose and squinting. His old-fashioned brown flannel pyjamas were rumpled around his soft bulk, and his first preoccupation seemed to be that his mother not catch sight of his pale and generous belly: he clutched at his pyjama strings and hoisted up the bottoms, revealing instead his oddly slender ankles and his long, hairy toes.

  “Have you been sleeping all this time, since breakfast?” Judy spoke sharply but felt a burst of tenderness for her befuddled boy, as he wavered before her, almost six feet tall. “Bootie? Frederick? Are you still asleep?”

  “Reading, Ma. I was reading in bed.”

  “But there’s two feet of snow in the drive, and it’s still coming down.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ve got to get out, don’t we.”

  “School’s cancelled. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “Just because I don’t have to teach doesn’t mean I don’t need to go anywhere. And what about you?”

  Frederick pushed a fist behind his glasses and rubbed his left eye.

  “You’re supposed to be looking for a job, aren’t you
? You’re not going to find one lying around in bed.”

  “There’s a snowstorm on. Everything is cancelled, not just school. There’s nowhere to go today, and no jobs to get today.” He seemed suddenly solid, even stolid, in his bulk. “Besides, my reading isn’t nothing. It’s work, too. Just because it’s not paid doesn’t mean it’s not work.”

  “Please, don’t start.”

  “Ask Uncle Murray. Don’t you think he spends his days reading?”

  “I don’t know what your uncle does with his time, Bootie, but I’d remind you that he’s well paid for it. Very well paid. And I know that when he was your age, he was in college and he had a job. Maybe two jobs, even. Because Pawpaw and Nana couldn’t afford—”

  “I know, Ma. I know. I’m going to finish my chapter. And then if it’s stopped snowing, I’ll shovel the drive.”

  “Even if it’s still snowing, Bootie. They’ve plowed the road twice since seven.”

  “Don’t call me Bootie,” he said as he retreated back into his bedroom. “It’s not my name.”

  Judy Tubb and her son lived in a spacious but crumbling Victorian house on the eastern side of Watertown, off the road to Lowville, in a neighborhood of other similarly sprawling, similarly decrepit buildings. Some had been broken up into apartments, and one, at the end of the street, had been abandoned, its elegant windows boarded over and its porch all but caved in; but that was simply the way of Watertown. It was still a good address, a fine house on a fine square lot at the good end of town, as respectable as it had been twenty years before when Bert and Judy had moved in with their little daughter, Sarah, and Bootie not even on the way.

  Born a mile from this house, Judy had lived her whole life in town, except for college and a few years teaching in Syracuse. Watertown was to her as invisible as her skin, and she no longer saw (if she ever had) the derelict storefronts and sagging porches. The grand downtown, once known as Garland City, its stone buildings and central plaza constructed on an imperial scale, impressed her only rarely as forlorn: mostly it seemed, as she drove through it to the high school or to the Price Chopper, of a blind and consoling familiarity. So, too, with their neighborhood, their house: she cleaved to them lovingly, simply because they were hers.

  The house itself had steep steps at its front, and a small cement patio with a little balcony overhanging, which opened off the upstairs hallway. The Tubbs had had aluminum siding put on in the early eighties—white, simple—but it had grown grubby and mottled with moss and mud, and was in places dented by fallen gutter pipes or bowed by the work of zealous squirrels or birds who had made their nests between the siding and the exterior wall. The remaining wood trim was painted green, but it had been worn bald in spots and was everywhere cracked and peeling. The snow covered the worst of the building’s indignities (including a rotting patch of brick in the foundation), and softened its outlines, so that the peaked roof—once of slate, now of poorly stapled asphalt sheeting—seemed to rise with a solid confidence into the clouded sky.

  Inside, the Tubbs’ home was still elegant—except, perhaps, Bootie’s room, a territory to which Judy laid no claim. Little had been done to the rooms in years—she had not had the courage for even a coat of paint since Bert’s death from pancreatic cancer four years before—and they had about them, perhaps in consequence, a heavy, darkened aspect; but she kept the house clean, its wood polished, its linoleum waxed, even its windows (at least in summer, when the storms were taken down) washed. There was little to be done about the stubborn dottings of mold on the basement wall (she blamed the aluminum siding, after all these years, which kept the house from breathing) or in a patch on the blue bathroom lino behind the toilet. But by and large, Judy considered that all was in fine repair, the old cabinets and wide-planked floors, even the small red-and-blue-lozenged stained-glass window over the front door, which she knew—Bert had discovered it; he loved researching such things—had been ordered from a Sears catalogue all the way back at the turn of the last century.

  She loved her house, largely though not only for the history that it held, and she was most partial to the upstairs—the grand, bright bedroom overlooking the street that she had shared with her dear husband, and where, were it not for the hospital, he would have died; the broad hall with its balcony and gleaming banisters; even the faded pink flowered carpet along the floor, with its faint smell of dust, which she knew so intimately that she could locate, in her mind, its gnawed edges, its threadbare patches and its irremovable stains. As she moved from that hallway into her beloved bedroom, worrying about her sullen son (it was the age, she kept telling herself, his and the culture’s), she felt she walked into the light: the two large windows cast a shadowless opalescence onto the sprigged wallpaper, the family photos on top of the bureau. Even her discarded stockings, still carrying from yesterday the shape of her solid limbs, appeared outlined in light, luminous. Her hands and her hair, a grayed cloud, had carried up from the kitchen the smell of coffee, and the vents at her ankles pushed a warm wind around the floor. In spite of Bootie, in spite, in spite, in this moment at least, she felt happy: she was not too old to love even the snow.

  Judy Tubb made her bed—tidily, smoothing the bottom sheet and removing the stray gray curls from her pillow, then squaring and tucking the top sheet, the mustard wool blanket. She fussed over the bedspread, its evenness on both sides, the plumpness of the pillows beneath its folds. She had no truck with duvets, flimsy and foreign: she liked the weight of a bed made with blankets, and the work of it. She showered, dried, and dressed in the bathroom in the hall—the house was Victorian, and had only the one bathroom in spite of four bedrooms—and emerged in her favorite blush turtleneck beneath the avocado angora cardigan she had knitted last winter. In truth, she had knitted it for her niece, Marina—God only knew why, because they weren’t close; except that she loved to knit and had already made a dozen sweaters for her daughter and her grandkids. But it wasn’t quite finished in time for Christmas, and somehow she had known, when she opened the gift Marina had sent—a crimson velvet scarf with cutaway flowers in it and silk tasseled fringe, like the shawl of a Victorian madam—she had just known that the sweater wasn’t right. She’d sent a Borders gift card instead, and kept the sweater for herself. As for the scarf, there was nowhere in Watertown, New York, that she could wear it—certainly not to teach Geography to the sophomores and juniors at the high school—so she had wrapped it up in tissue and put it in the back of her dresser drawer. The funny thing was, she loved the cardigan as if it had been a precious gift, and she somehow thought of it as a gift from Marina, which made her think more warmly of the girl after all, and which, in a roundabout way, it was.

  As she bundled herself into her parka, her Bean boots, her pink woolly toque (also her own handiwork, a pretty lace pattern with a bobble on top), and took, in her mittened hands, the aluminum shovel from the porch, she worried about Bootie, upstairs in his pajamas like a boy. She wouldn’t ask him again to help with the shoveling—he could perfectly well hear the rhythmic scrape and shuffle of her movements from his window overhead—but she hoped against hope that he might come down of his own accord. Of course if he did come, it would mean another day he hadn’t bathed. She didn’t like to nag him about it (who wanted to be that kind of mother, always picking and finding fault?), but she couldn’t remember hearing the tub run once in the past week. He took only baths, not showers, and those rarely; but when he did he lingered an hour in the cooling water, reading one of his infernal books.

  Judy Tubb tackled the snow in the driveway first and, in spite of the delicious cold of the shovel through her mittens, in spite of the cold sting pinkening her cheeks, in spite of the satisfying soreness she felt, almost immediately, in her lower back, she felt her good humor evaporating as she thought again about her boy. Her darling and only. Her prize. What was it now? March, it was March now, and almost Easter. And Bootie had graduated almost a year ago, at the top of his class. She’d never imagined he would still be here, o
r would be back here; and when, in September, he’d gone off to Oswego, she’d thought that it was the beginning of his life in the wider world. No telling what he could accomplish. And if Bert were still alive, he’d see that his youngest had fulfilled the promise, that all the saving (Bert had been an accountant, and wisely parsimonious) had been for something. For Bootie to shine. It was Sarah who’d given them trouble, pregnant at nineteen and married at twenty, but now she had a good job at the savings and loan and three tow-headed, boisterous kids, and her Tom had proven a good husband and settled into his work running Thousand Islands boat tours out of Alexandria Bay in the summer and plowing on a state contract in the winter. Heck, Tom would probably drive down from the bay and shovel out her drive before her own boy stirred himself to help her. He was a good son-in-law, even if she’d hoped, once, for better.

  But Bootie: he was going to be a politician, he’d said, or a journalist like his uncle, or maybe a university professor. That’s what the kids had called him at the high school: the professor. He’d been a chubby boy, and bespectacled, but always respected, even admired, in a funny way. He’d been valedictorian. And then home at Christmas with twenty or thirty extra pounds on him and a fistful of incompletes, saying that college was bullshit, or at least Oswego was bullshit, that his teachers were morons and he wouldn’t go back. She suspected a girl, some girl had broken his heart or embarrassed him—he wasn’t easy with girls, not confident—or else his roommates, two tight lunk-headed athletes with beer on the brain; but Bootie wasn’t telling, or not telling her. And since Christmas he’d spent all his time in his room, reading and doing God knew what on the computer (was it pornography? That would be okay, she could understand it in a young boy, but as a distraction, not an obsession; and if only she knew), or in the grand pillared library downtown, where the heat was always too high and the air smelled funny and where, to be honest, he had to order books from out of town to get anything more serious than Harlequin romances or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Had he looked for a job? Not once until last month, when she gave him an ultimatum, told him he’d have to pay rent one way or another, if he wouldn’t go back to school; so that now he made a big show at breakfast with the classifieds, circling factory jobs and short-order cook positions and suggesting—it was the only time he laughed these days—that he could sell used cars at Loudoun’s Ford & Truck, or wait tables at Annie’s off the interstate.