“Ever attend the citizenship ceremony at Monticello? They do it every Fourth of July.”
“No, can’t say that I have, but I’d better do it if I’m going to run for the state Senate.”
“I have. Standing out there on the lawn are Vietnamese, Poles, Ecuadorians, Nigerians, Scots, you name it. They raise their hands, and this is after they’ve demonstrated a knowledge of the Constitution, mind you, and they swear allegiance to this nation. I figure after that they’re as American as we are.”
“You are a generous soul, Harry.” Warren slapped her on the back. “Here, I’ve got something for you.” He handed her a carton of the rubber paving bricks. It was heavy.
“Thank you, Warren, these will come in handy.” She was thrilled with the gift.
“Oh, here. What kind of a gentleman am I? Let me carry this to the truck.”
“We could carry it together,” Harry offered. “And, by the bye, I think you should run for the state Senate.”
Warren spied a wheelbarrow and placed the carton in it.“You do? Well, thank you.” He picked up the arms of the wheelbarrow. “Might as well use the wheel. Just think if the guy who invented it got royalties!”
“How do you know a woman didn’t invent the wheel?”
“You got me there.” Warren enjoyed Harry. Unlike his wife, Ansley, Harry was relaxed. He couldn’t imagine her wearing nail polish or fretting over clothes. He rather wished he weren’t a married man when he was around Harry.
“Warren, why don’t you let me come on out here and bush-hog a field or two? These bricks are so expensive, I feel guilty accepting them.”
“Hey, I’m not on food stamps. Besides, these are an overflow and I’ve got nowhere else to use them. You love your horses, so I bet you could use them in your wash rack … put them in the center and then put rubber mats like you have in the trailer around that. Not a bad compromise.”
“Great idea.”
Ansley pulled into the driveway, her bronzed Jaguar as sleek and as sexy as herself. Stuart and Breton were with her. She saw Harry and Warren pushing the wheelbarrow and drove over to them instead of heading for the house.
“Harry,” she called from inside the car, “how good to see you.”
“Your husband is playing Santa Claus.” Harry pointed to the carton.
“Hi, Harry,” the boys called out. Harry returned their greeting with a wave.
Ansley parked and elegantly disembarked from the Jag. Stuart and Breton ran up to the house.“You know Warren. He has to have a new project. But I must admit the barn looks fabulous and the stuff couldn’t be safer. Now, you come on up to the house and have a drink. Big Daddy’s up there, and he loves a pretty lady.”
“Thanks, I’d love to, but I’d better push on home.”
“Oh, I ran into Mim,” Ansley mentioned to her husband. “She now wants you on the Greater Crozet Committee.”
Warren winced.“Poppa just gave her a bushel of money for her Mulberry Row project—she’s working over our family one by one.”
“She knows that, and she said to my face how ‘responsible’ the Randolphs are. Now she wants your stores of wisdom. Exact words. She’ll ask you for money another time.”
“Stores of wisdom.” The left side of Harry’s mouth twitched in a suppressed giggle as she looked at Warren. At forty-one, he remained a handsome man.
Warren grunted as he lifted the heavy carton onto the tailgate.“Is it possible for a woman to have a Napoleon complex?”
18
The human mouth is a wonderful creation, except that it can rarely remain shut. The jaw, hinged on each side of the face, opens and closes in a rhythm that allows the tongue to waggle in a staggering variety of languages. Gossip fuels all of them. Who did what to whom. Who said what to whom. Who didn’t say a word. Who has how much money and who spends it or doesn’t. Who sleeps with whom. Those topics form the foundation of human discourse. Occasionally the human can discuss work, profit and loss, and what’s for supper. Sometimes a question or two regarding the arts will pass although sports as a subject is a better bet. Rare moments bring forth a meditation on spirituality, philosophy, and the meaning of life. But the backbeat, the pulse, the percussion of exchange, was, is, and ever shall be gossip.
Today gossip reached a crescendo.
Mrs. Hogendobber picked up her paper the minute the paperboy left it in the cylindrical plastic container. That was at six A.M. She knew that Harry’s fading red mailbox, nailed to an old fence post, sat half a mile from her house. She usually scooped out the paper on her way to work, so she wouldn’t have read it yet.
Mrs. H. grabbed the black telephone that had served her well since 1954. The click, click, click as the rotary dial turned would allow a sharp-eared person to identify the number being called.
“Harry, Wesley Randolph died last night.”
“What? I thought Wesley was so much better.”
“Heart attack.” She sounded matter-of-fact. By this time she’d seen enough people leave this life to bear it with grace. One positive thing about Wesley’s death was that he’d been fighting leukemia for years. At least he wouldn’t die a lingering, painful death. “Someone from the farm must have given the information to the press the minute it happened.”
“I just saw Warren Sunday afternoon. Thanks for telling me. I’ll have to pay my respects after work. See you in a little bit.”
Now, telling a friend of another friend’s passing doesn’t fall under the heading of gossip, but that day at work Harry sloshed around in it.
The first person to alert Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber to the real story was Lucinda Coles. Luckily Mim Sanburne was picking up her mail, so they could cross-fertilize, as it were.
“—everywhere.” Lucinda gulped a breath in the middle of her story about Ansley Randolph. “Warren, in a state of great distress, naturally, was finally reduced to calling merchants to see if by chance Ansley had stopped by on her rounds. Well, he couldn’t find her. He called me and I said I didn’t know where she was. Of course, I had no idea the poor man’s father had dropped dead in the library.”
Mim laid a trump card on the table.“Yes, he called me too, and like you, Lulu, I hadn’t a clue, but I had seen Ansley at about five that afternoon at Foods of All Nations. Buying a bottle of expensive red wine: Medoc, 1970, Ch?teau le Trelion. She seemed surprised to see me”—Mim paused—“almost as if I had caught her out… you know.”
“Uh-huh.” Lucinda nodded in the customary manner of a woman affirming whatever another woman has said. Of course, the other woman’s comment usually has to do with emotions, which could never actually be qualified or quantified—that being the appeal of emotions. They both acknowledged a tyranny of correct feelings.
“She’s running around on Warren.”
“Uh-huh.” Lucinda’s voice grew in resonance, since she, as a victim of infidelity, was also an expert on its aftermath. “No good will come of it. No good ever does.”
After those two left, BoomBoom Craycroft dashed in for her mail. Her comment, after a lengthy discussion of the slight fracture of her tibia, was that everybody screws around on everybody, and so what?
The men approached the subject differently. Mr. Randolph’s demise was characterized by Market as a response to his dwindling finances and the leukemia. It was hard for Harry to believe a man would have a heart attack because his estate had diminished, thanks to his own efforts, from $250 million to $100 million, but anything was possible. Perhaps he felt poor.
Fair Haristeen lingered over the counter, chatting. His idea was that a life of trying to control everybody and everything had ruined Wesley Randolph’s health. Sad, of course, because Randolph was an engaging man. Mostly, Fair wanted Harry to pick which movie they would see Friday night.