CHAPTER ONESOME HIDEOUS COMPROMISE
Ransom Musgrove has been summoned to the house of his youth, the Romanesque revival mansion from the 1880s that everyone calls the “Old Fort”—on account of the parapet and the grand turret and the gargoyles and all the ivied brickwork. As he comes up the walk he gets flashes from his boyhood. Under that pecan, first kiss with Debbie Gannon. Under the crepe myrtle, third base with Lu Ann Farris. Up in the brown turkey fig tree, wasn’t there some death match with his big brother, David? He has a vague memory of David taunting him, of getting so mad he went for David’s throat and forgot to hold on to the limb. He doesn’t recall what happened next.
Then at the front steps he has one more memory.
Thirteen years old. Standing out here awaiting the carpool to school and daydreaming, when his mother appeared on the balcony. Although it was a bright, sunny morning, she was drunk. Clearly she’d been out partying the night before and hadn’t been to bed yet. She began to disparage him in the third person, one of her favorite pastimes. She said, “While the kid dawdles there like an idiot, gathering wool, concocting his little fantasies about how the world should be, the real world keeps marching on, doesn’t it? Clomp clomp clomp, crushing his little dreams. Does he even notice? No, he’s too stupid. Is he going to be a hobo? Well yes, that’s certain, unless he gets some ambition and starts kiting checks. Ha ha ha.”
He hoped that the arrival of the carpool would shut her up. And it did, for a moment. Mrs. Tarkanian’s big Suburban pulled up, and he squeezed into the second row with two other kids while Mother, up on that balcony, produced a silk handkerchief and waved it. Mrs. Tarkanian waved back. “Hey, Morgana.” His mother said, in a loud tragic voice, “Hey, Laurel. Goodbye, Laurel. Goodbye, my son who is destined to be a vagabond.” Her position when drunk was always: I’ll speak the truth and the public be damned. As the carpool pulled away he felt his mortification in his jawbone and his spine, and silently begged for death. However, the other kids made no comment. Maybe they’d thought she was joking? Or they hadn’t understood the word? However, years later a girl who’d been in that car told him she’d thought it was “romantic, scary but kind of romantic the way your mom stood up on that balcony that day telling the whole neighborhood how you were destined to be a vagabond.”
It’s not lost on him that Morgana’s prophecy has come true.
Up four steps to the porch, to the front door with the spiderweb fanlight and sidelight, and he hasn’t even seen her yet but already he feels the bad juice in his veins, and has to remind himself that she summoned him (sending her accountant to find his tent under the Harry S Truman exit ramp), that he’s still a free man, he’s thirty-three years old and should she try to start anything, to flip any of his switches, he can just turn and walk away. Anytime he’s so inclined. So he tells himself.
He turns the door crank. Here comes Betty the maid.
“Raaan-sum!”
Betty’s a white woman in her late thirties. She grew up on a farm in Odom, Georgia, and wears a perpetually awestruck look, and dresses in baggy browns and grays, and always has a slow and languorous drawl even on the rare occasions when she isn’t riding her magic carpet of downers. When she says, “Oh, your mama will be so glad!” the last words seem to roll on forever: sooo glayyyy-uddd.
She hugs his neck and then holds the door open for him.
He steps inside.
His eyes have to adjust. The foyer is always kept in the gloaming, with only a thin light slanting down from the oriel window. There’s the pomp of the staircase, and the bronze sconces and the walnut secretary desk, and the still lifes and fantastical landscapes that Morgana loves. His forebears scowl down from their frames. He appreciates that none of them pretend to be happy.
However, Betty does pretend. When he asks how she’s doing, she smiles and says, “So well, Ransom.” Raaan-sum. He knows this to be false. A few weeks ago she went to the home of her ex-boyfriend’s new flame and borrowed a cup of sugar from her. Then found her ex’s Durango on the street, and emptied the sugar into the tank. Not coy about it. Bystanders took out their phones and recorded her. She posed with that cup the way Annie Oakley would pose with her pistol. Then she returned the cup to the new girlfriend and thanked her. The videos became popular of course. Now she’s in a great deal of trouble but keeps a brave face and says to Ransom, “It’s such a lovely dayyyy, isn’t it?” and leads him straight to his mother.
Morgana stands at the dining room table. She’s plumping up an immense arrangement of flowers. “My beloved,” she coos, raising her cheek for the requisite buss. “You look terribly thin. Are you eating dandelions and wild asparagus?”
“I’m eating fine, Mother.”
And somewhat to his surprise, she drops it. Doesn’t needle him at all. Doesn’t accuse him of “assuming some pose of dereliction to which you are frankly unentitled,” or charge him with “plunging a dagger into the heart of your family.” She simply gestures for him to take a seat. With a quick smile, as she resumes her arranging.
She must truly need something.
She is wearing a mauve silk shirt and her honeycomb brooch, and looks quite formal. Not “imperial”: her enemies call her that, but really she’s too small and birdlike to fit that description—and, just now, too busy. She’s laying in a base for her spray. Building a pedestal of ruscus and aspidistra and stock and freesia (Ransom grew up amid her flowers and knows them all). She asks, “Would you care for iced tea?”
“Thanks, yes.”
She nods; Betty goes off.
He watches his mother work. The snip-snip of the shears. After a moment though, she frowns and says, “Oh it’s impossible.”
“What is?”
“It’s for my event tonight, the Spring Soiree for the Disabled. Every year the big spray is all anyone talks about, and every year it gets harder to assemble. Would you just look at these?” Holding up a few stems loaded with garish blooms. “They’re called Papaya Popsicles. They’re ludicrous yet must be given prominence, because they were grown by Rebecca Cressling, who donated sixty thousand dollars last year. What do you think?”
“Sort of blaring.”
“Yet it gets worse.”
She shows him a clutch of black blossoms with long white whiskers. “We must also give pride of place to these. Bat flowers. Have you ever seen the like? Grown by Jane Rundle with great care in her greenhouse. And why did she do this? No one can say. But she has bequeathed us one point five million dollars in her will, so we must not dishonor her little nightmares. I thought of cutting the stems long, that they might loom over the whole show like so many Grim Reapers—a metaphor for how Jane’s death looms over us. Looms yet never quite happens, does it? But that would demote the Popsicles. You see my dilemma? I have to feature both Popsicles and bat flowers. I must create some hideous compromise.”
“Mother?”
“Yes, dear.”
“You asked to see me.”
She turns to give him a full look.
“Right. Well. Yesterday Johnny Cooper came by.”
Johnny Cooper manages Musgrove Investigations—one of the many little sidelines created by Ransom’s father and still in Morgana’s possession.
He says, “You still haven’t sold that?”
“No, but I’ve rather neglected it. Of course, it’s never brought me a dime in profit. But then it didn’t for your father either. Frankly I believe profit wasn’t the point for him. I believe he used it in his business dealings. To keep track of his rivals.”
Ransom’s gaze flicks away from her: he turns to the portraits, his scowling forebears. She catches the shift.
“Darling,” she asks, “are you hiding a smile?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you think he was keeping track of me.”
Just at that moment though, Betty reappears, with a pitcher of her lemony tea and two of the pineapple-crystal glasses inherited from Great-great-aunt Inez.
“And Betty,” says Morgana, “do you suppose you could stop by Mooney’s and collect those three hams?”
“Right away, ma’am.”
“None but the long-cured. If he tries to pass off one of those honey-glazed tourist things, tell him to shove it back up from whence it came. You hear?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And get Mr. Riley to check the oil on the beast.”
“Yes ma’am, uh-huh, I will.” Adding, as she withdraws: “Oh handsome Ransom, you need to come live here with us.”
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