Page 17

Chapter 12

Kennedy Carter

San Francisco, April 2015

Kennedy let the windows down in her rental Audi SUV and felt the cool Bay Area air flow over her face and arms. With a few weeks to go until she had to be in Watcha Cove to hunker down on her video editing, she’d blown off her Friday classes at USC, flown to San Francisco, and rented a car for the drive to Marin County to interview one of her dad’s high school friends. Kennedy was assembling the puzzle of her father’s life, and a key piece of it was parsing out people who had authentic relationships with him. So far, the majority of people she’d talked to were either afraid of her father, or on his payroll, or a combination of both. There were a handful of people who’d known him for many years, and she hoped that their testimonies would add some humanity to her film.

The Burkes, a family that her mother had put on a list of preapproved participants for the tribute video, were all too eager to discuss her father. The twins had been his boarding school classmates, one now living in Boston and the other in San Francisco. She figured that she would fly to San Francisco to film in person and boarded a commercial flight since neither Carter child was ever allowed to fly in the jet alone.

Hours later, she waited for the gate to open to the estate of Philip Burke, the younger twin. Philip had made his money, like most of his Silicon Valley neighbors, by investing in a bunch of risky and seemingly insane ventures. A housekeeper answered the door and showed Kennedy to a cavernous living room complete with neutral, oversize furniture that appeared to have never been used. The space had strict, harsh lines and a punishing sterile energy, the type of home she’d been in many times before.

Kennedy had opted to do the filming for this project alone so that she could conduct interviews privately. The only person that she trusted to help her was her best friend, Tashia Carter. She slid her phone out to text her. Here at Philip Burke’s place, she wrote. Hopefully will get something good, will let you know. xx

The two had met years ago when Tashia Carter had entered Dalton as a scholarship student in her ninth-grade year. She and Kennedy were forced into a bond by coincidence of having the same last name and constantly had to explain to the student body and faculty that they weren’t sisters or cousins or even acquainted.

By ninth grade, the total number of Black students in Kennedy’s class of ninety had capped out at six. There were three boys and three girls. The three boys, all Jack and Jill members, were longtime friends of the wealthier Carters, and two of them were Dalton lifers. Of the three girls, one was the biracial offspring of a white entertainment executive and her ex-actor boyfriend. She was a very beautiful but kind of clueless girl who, when pressed about her identity, almost always mentioned that she was both “white and Black.” It only made sense when you processed that her Black father was a West Coast resident for the majority of the year, and she visited with him exclusively in the summer and even then, not the whole summer. The other two were Tashia and Kennedy Carter.

For Dalton, Tashia was considered radical. On appearance alone she rejected tradition and constantly challenged the dress code, many considering her Afrocentric jewelry and red-tipped locs to be a brazen statement. Tashia had eventually made peace with studying among the privileged, having decided that she had every right to access the type of resources through study and hard work that the wealthy took for granted. But she’d promised herself she would never change who she was. Kennedy loved that about her, had always yearned to have Tashia’s strength. The two had managed to maintain a deep friendship over the years, with Tashia even venturing to help Kennedy out with research and editing on her dad’s film.

When Philip Burke finally walked into his own living room, his approach was silent, his bare feet barely skimming his natural-stone floors. A lifelong friend of the family, Kennedy had an easy rapport with him as she explained the premise of her video and the types of questions she’d be asking. “So I was really hoping that maybe you could tell me something about my dad when you knew him at school, something no one else knows. I think getting some cool stuff about him in the video will make it really special,” she said.

Philip Burke nodded and rubbed his clean-shaven chin, his round tortoiseshell glasses perched slightly down on his nose. His fair skin glistened in the light, giving him a slight glow.

“Well, I’ll see what I can muster up. You know, this old memory isn’t exactly like it used to be, and the Galston days ... Well, that was a long time ago,” he replied. “Okay, how about when we took your dad to Martha’s Vineyard for the first time? That might be a good story.”

Kennedy was practically salivating with enthusiasm. She’d basically grown up on the island, the Watcha Cove estate being a place of the happiest memories. This was going to be exactly what she needed.

“Now, like I said, this was a long time ago,” Philip prefaced again.

“That’s okay,” Kennedy encouraged him. “Just tell me what you remember.” With Philip’s blessing, she had already set up her tripod and pressed record on her camera.

“I was a kid, so I guess that I remember my brother and me being very enamored with William. He was unusually studious for a high school boy. Not that we weren’t, but there was something else inside him that was really pushing him toward something. We just liked having him around, so we asked our mother to see if he could come to the Vineyard over the summer break. If I’m not mistaken, your grandfather worked at the school, and his home phone number was listed in the directory, but our mother was formal so she both wrote and called. Your grandma ... she was a bit shocked—maybe at the idea that children would spend entire summers as well as school years away from their parents. I think she said no at first.”

Kennedy, who’d gone several weeks at a time without ever seeing her parents since she was born, wasn’t fazed by this, though she could understand that this was a very mystifying request for the uninitiated.

“So as I understand it, on his next biweekly call home, William asked his mother if he could summer with us. He told her that ‘summer’ was a verb,” Philip said with a laugh. “I can’t imagine that went over too well. I think that your grandmother thought that school was changing him, and I think that maybe it was and it wasn’t.”

“But she said yes?” Kennedy interjected. She knew that the best interviews for screen were uninterrupted, and she didn’t want to put too much of herself in the project, but she had to know.

Philip nodded. “She said yes, and the next time we saw William after school had let out was on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “So listen to this, even though the ocean was right there and he’d never been on a boat, at least from what he admitted to us, William spent the entire time just looking at the people. I kept catching him staring at everyone. I never did figure out exactly what he was looking so intently at.”

Kennedy was able to figure this part out on her own. Her father loved to talk about just how special he found Martha’s Vineyard to be, how during his first trips there he was dazzled by the picturesque parade of Black families emerging from luxury vehicles, waiting to be transported to the island. So many people greeted each other with relaxed familiarity as everyone seemed to know each other. He could feel their delight and excitement over being reunited. This, one of the few joyous memories her stern, private father was ecstatic to share with his children.

Philip was laughing when he said, “I know you all call your property a cottage, but back then our house really was a cottage. It was a tiny three-bedroom on a five-acre lot.” In the years since, the Burke brothers had leveled the original structure and erected a modern behemoth, filling it with late-twentieth-century art and cutting into the land for a private pool. But that was beside the point.

Kennedy looked at her camera’s battery life. She’d been recording for twenty-eight minutes but still didn’t feel like the story Philip shared was particularly unique since she’d heard it so many times before. And it wouldn’t feel that special to her father’s birthday guests either, she surmised. She decided to change course.

“Anything that you ever learned about in school that you think had a big impression on my dad?” she asked.

Philip fell silent. “Well, I guess, now that you mention it,” he began, “there was a strange history lesson on blue bloods, which I think had an interesting effect on your father.”

Kennedy waited for him to continue.

“So this was a schtick that one of our history teachers had been doing for years as a direct callout to the fact that at least eighty percent of the students at Galston considered themselves to be descended from aristocracy, and it was delivered like an elaborate inside joke.”

Kennedy perked up. She’d never heard this.

“We’re there, learning about European history, and at one point the Moors had begun to intermingle with white Spaniards, producing darker-skinned offspring, which was an undesirable result, to be sure, but ultimately a means of self-protection, right? Because if they can start to get the white people to look more like them, then they can’t really be told that whiteness is such a virtue. So anyway, to avoid this fate, certain royals fled the impending wave of biological darkening and retreated to the mountains, where they remained indoors, letting their tanner subjects do the hard physical labor to keep the kingdom functional. The result for the ones who remained shuttered up inside was skin so pale that it made their veins look blue. Blue bloods.”

“Is that true?” Kennedy asked.

“Probably somewhat,” Philip said. “But what was interesting that day is that I think your father felt very lonely. I mean, for us, we’re Black, but as you can see, I could easily pass for white in some circles.” He continued with a shrug. “Your dad was the only visibly dark ‘non–blue blood’ in the room.”

“Hm,” Kennedy said in response. This wasn’t the kind of anecdote she was expecting.

“I just remember the look on your father’s face as the teacher spoke, as if he wanted to challenge him. Like he was being reminded that he didn’t belong at Galston. I saw that look a few times on your father’s face on campus. A mixture of anger and defiance, like he would show what he was capable of no matter how he was judged by his skin color. I always admired that about him, the vision he had for his life.”

Kennedy ended the recording and thanked Philip, not at all sure what she could do with the footage she’d just recorded. Would her father want painful memories from the past to be showcased on his special day? She doubted it, but she did feel closer to him in a way, considering her own experiences at Dalton.

As she was getting in her rental car to leave, she shook a cigarette loose from her pack and put it between her lips for the ride. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in the car, but they could charge her a fee. She texted Tashia: Leaving now, will upload later. I think my dad is obsessed with blue bloods? Call me.