“Yes, Miss,” the cook said doubtfully, and Evelyn left the kitchen before she could reconsider.
It was amazing the turmoil the house was in, and doubly amazing when one considered the situation that had brought it all about. Except that it was the middle of the summer and the latter third of the twentieth century, they might have been in the middle of preparations for some sort of Dickensian clan-gathering Christmas feast. But all of this was merely because Bradford was engaged yet again in rescuing Harrison from the results of his folly.
Why Harrison insisted on traveling only with his complete family no one, least of all Evelyn, could say for sure. Particularly since so many members of it couldn’t stand one another. But when the Harrison Lockridges traveled they invariably traveled en masse, which meant Harrison and his wife Patricia, his two daughters, Martha Simcoe and Patricia Chatham, their husbands Earl Chatham and Maurice Simcoe, and all the available grandchildren, being twelve-year-old Bradford Chatham and the five Simcoe girls, ranging in age from sixteen to eight, and named Pam, Robin, Barbie, Tamara and Jackie. That was a total of twelve people, six adults and six children, and this time there would be one more adult, since Herbert Jarvis, Harrison’s brother-in-law and business partner, would be coming along as well.
Evelyn found herself grateful that Herbert Jarvis, now in his mid-fifties, had never married.
For some reason it never really mattered what the purpose for a family gathering might be, the fact of it was inescapably festive. It might even be a funeral they were all gathering for, but the inevitable bustle and scurry of preparation couldn’t help but give an overlay of holiday to the affair. So the fact that Harrison was coming here with his tail between his legs, a felony indictment at his heels, didn’t matter. Seven adults and six children were coming, and an atmosphere of cheerful confusion and expectation was willy-nilly engulfing the house.
Tomorrow. They were coming tomorrow, Wednesday, the eighteenth of July, and the house was nowhere near ready. Evelyn, trying to keep all the preparations in her head because she didn’t have time to sit down and write a list, prowled anxiously from room to room, knowing there were things she was forgetting. And to make matters worse, this time the whole thing was resting on her shoulders alone.
Usually Bradford would take charge in a situation like this, and she would act as his adjutant and assistant, but this time he was having no part of it. In the week since he’d returned from Paris he’d been increasingly irritable and remote, wanting nothing to do with the preparations for Harrison’s arrival. Evelyn supposed it was the reaction to his disappointment over the Paris trip — which seemed also to have left him very tired, with a weariness he couldn’t seem to shake — so she left him alone and did what she could herself. Bradford meanwhile could usually be found in the back library, reading.
Three rooms in the house had been set aside for books. Downstairs, in a windowless room in the middle of the house, was the room simply called the library, containing general non-fiction. Upstairs near the guest rooms, with windows overlooking the front drive, was the room called the upstairs library, the shelves lined with rapidly dating fiction. And also on the second floor, at the rear next to Bradford’s office, was the room called the back library, which was limited to books of a political nature.
It was in the back library that Bradford had been closeting himself this past week, and whenever Evelyn had entered the room he’d been sitting in the brown leather chair by the window, one book in his lap and half a dozen others stacked open on the table beside him. He frowned as he read, and was angry when interrupted.
Well, let him have his interval to himself. (He’d even managed to turn Howard away, via telephone, which no one had ever been able to do before.) He had had a disastrous time in Paris, and he was having an uncomfortable time coming up with Harrison, so he deserved this rest period in between.
It would end tomorrow.
ii
He sent the bus for them.
That had been a joke for years, that some trip he would send the bus for them, but he’d never seriously intended to do it, not till now. That showed more than anything else, Evelyn thought, just how troubled and angry Bradford was this time, and perhaps how much he was carrying forward his Paris disappointment and making Harrison pay for it.
The bus was an anomaly, an old brown monstrosity from the White Corporation, old enough to have a hood. It seemed to have been in the Army at one time, which explained the color and the white numbers stenciled on it here and there. It had appeared at Eustace at some point in Bradford’s Presidency, he was no longer sure when or why, and had just stayed. The registration seemed to be in Bradford’s name, there was room for it in the garage, and it even proved occasionally useful, so they’d never gotten rid of it. But in the ten or eleven years he’d had it, Bradford had never before sent it to Hagerstown to pick up Harrison.
He seemed to take a kind of angry pleasure in the thought of Harrison and the bus. “He’ll ride it,” he told Evelyn. “I wouldn’t ride it, I’d take one look and be on the next plane back home. Sterling wouldn’t ride it, he’d send it back empty and hire two cars right there at the airport and come on out here and never say a word about it. But Harrison will ride it.”
Evelyn didn’t say anything. She knew Harrison could be taken advantage of, everybody knew that. He wouldn’t be coming here if it hadn’t happened to him again. But Bradford had never been angry enough at Harrison before to rub his nose in it, and if he was now it meant the three days of the visit were going to be even worse than she’d supposed. Because Patricia wouldn’t stand for it. Patricia, Harrison’s wife, was the strength in the family, and she defended Harrison with grim fury and no regard for rules. She would take the bus, mostly because Harrison would be afraid not to, but she wouldn’t like it and she wouldn’t let it end there. And if Bradford’s treatment of Harrison was going to be harsh, Patricia’s treatment of Bradford would be a lot harsher.
There were two Patricias coming, of course, the other being Patricia Chatham, Harrison’s older daughter. Here and there throughout the family were boys and men named after their fathers, from Eddie Lockridge in Paris to BJ in Washington; it was somehow appropriate that Harrison would have a daughter named after his wife.
And the Patricias were as alike as two tigresses in the same cage, the daughter just as grim, just as wary, just as quick to offense as her mother. They hated one another, naturally; there hadn’t been one visit here that Harrison’s wife and older daughter had not had at least one screaming vicious up-and-down the stairs door-slamming fight. And all with Earl Chatham, the son-in-law, as ineffective at controlling Patricia junior as Harrison himself was with Patricia senior; Earl would be going around with a pained smile on his face while occasionally making inept passes at Evelyn. (He’d made them while Fred was alive, too.)
Would the presence of the elder Patricia’s brother, Herbert Jarvis, alter the pattern this time? Evelyn doubted it; Herbert was Harrison’s business partner, who had somehow managed to remain uninvolved in the family squabbles over the years, living in the calm eye of the storm and concerning himself completely with business affairs, an arrangement he would have no reason to want to change now.
And the final two adults? These were Harrison’s younger daughter Martha, and her husband Maurice Simcoe. Martha, for all the thirty-eight years of her life so far, had been terrorized by her sister and mother, both of whom used her as a scratching post between bouts with one another, and the result was a silent nervous woman, eager to please but fumble-fingered in every way.