“All right, all right.”
“You went to Duke and Davidson and you aren’t smart enough…” She was smiling now. “… not smart enough to keep us from getting blocked in the driveway?”
“And here’s Annie,” he noted.
Annie’s unmistakable fire-engine-red BMW cruised up the hill of Providence, and she turned at speed into the driveway, the brakes squealing to a stop.
“Wonder what that car costs,” Kate muttered, preparing to carry their box of Tupperware inside.
“She must be doing well. Guess I went into the wrong line of work.”
She kissed his cheek. “You deal in spiritual real estate.”
It took a moment for Annie to raise her bulk out of her car, but once up on her feet, with her blouse and skirt smoothed down, she just about matched her billboards. Her hair was lustrous, Annie’s brown was lightening a shade with each trip to the salon—blonder than he’d ever seen it, which was amazing given all her teenage rants against blondes and their innate evils.
“Her face is different,” whispered Kate, before calling out hello. “Hello, Annie! You look great. You’ve … lost weight, maybe?”
Annie came over to carry one of their Tupperware stacks. She started right in on Bo: “You don’t look much like Dad or Mom. You’re five inches taller than the rest of us, right? Do you think there’s a chance we’re adopted? I don’t look like either of them.”
“Dad and I are both six-three,” he said. “And you look like Grandma.”
“Ow, thanks for that—she’s a gargoyle.”
“When she was younger. You have the same eyes.”
“I’ve heard of families where they adopt and then before they can discuss it with the kids, the mom gets pregnant so they end up with adopted and nonadopted kids, so they don’t want one group to feel they’re different so they don’t say anything.”
“I have a church of a thousand congregants, probably two thousand when you count non-regular attenders, and I’ve heard of every social situation in the world and I’ve never heard of that.” Bo got the ice chest from the back of the van with a groan. “This is the second time you’ve floated this theory. Why don’t you want to be related by blood to our family?”
“That question doesn’t explain itself?”
Skip and Jerilyn arrived next. Skip, Bo thought, was his usual party-boy collegiate self, coming at Reverend Johnston with a series of hip-hop handshakes that Bo had no clue how to respond to. “Are you my new sister-in-law, Kate?” he asked Bo’s wife. “Or is it just the sister of my wife that’s my sister-in-law?”
“We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ,” Annie said, a foretaste of the religious ridicule ahead.
Christmas Dinner à la Jerene Jarvis Johnston was elaborate and Bo was never unimpressed when he entered the dining room and saw his childhood dinner table expanded to its maximum, transformed to something out of a home décor magazine. Christmas china at each place setting (not to be eaten on, those plates would be substituted with other fine china when the meal started coming out in stages), polished silver cutlery, crystal glasses for iced tea and a champagne flute, a central array of pine boughs, holly with red berries (grown in the backyard), red and green Christmas ornaments arranged tastefully up and down the table, between six silver candlesticks, all candles lit, the smell of goose roasting, and something with cinnamon, Alma and Jerene taking pies out of the oven to cool, and something maternal and homey, bread baking …
“Don’t get any ideas,” Kate whispered to Bo, “that I’m taking this over one day.” Kate was a functional cook, made a few things well, but she had had a childhood utterly devoid of womanly training, graces, niceties. He knew his wife felt vaguely guilty wallowing in this hospitality, this gilded bower she had married into. “What expense,” she sighed.
“Gone to, let me remind you, because my mom working on this meal for a solid week is her way of saying she loves us.”
She found her husband’s hand. “Among other things.”
Aside from the long table, there was an antique server from which the diners would help themselves to the first course, which was buffet style. Chafing dishes of sausages in croissant dough, warm copper pans with stuffed mushrooms, German meatballs, soft cheese straws, plates of dates and sweetmeats, red and green miniature heirloom tomatoes piled in a mound like cannonballs, red-skin peanuts and peeled pistachios (red and green!), rind pickles, dilled cornichons, bread-and-butter pickle slices, marinated turnips and radishes (from the Middle Eastern store), spring onion and celery sprigs for dipping into Alma’s famous pimento cheese (yes, with green and red pepper flecks)—talk about your Proustian memories. Bo nearly hugged himself; how many familiar beloved tastes were assembled here from childhood.
Everyone heard the familiar noise of a car in the drive. First, Aunt Dillard was through the door looking festive (a knit sweater starring a sequined Santa Claus with his arm around a fuzzy-woolly Snowman) but afflicted in her person. Gaston had brought her and he was getting something from the trunk, while Dillard made the twenty-yard, slightly inclined commute from the driveway.
“Oh Lordy,” she said, panting. “Can’t do your Mount Everest anymore.”
Jerene rushed to deposit her sister in a plush armchair in the living room.
“I can get you aspirin, Tylenol, Advil…”
“Next Christmas, if I come, if I’m still alive—”
“Hush!”
“I’ll arrange to come especially early and be dropped two inches from the door. No, Jerene, save your medicine cabinet, I’m already medicated to a fare-thee-well. But I will hold out for some of what Gaston is bringing.”
“Oh dear, he’s not bringing wine, is he?”
A cheer went up from Annie, Jerilyn and Skip, with a quiet Hear, hear from a traitorous Mr. Johnston. Bo and Kate looked at each other with relief. Then Gaston lumbered through the door, carrying a cloth bottle bag that held nine bottles, arranged like a tic-tac-toe with separators to keep the bottles from clinking. “Now, Jerry,” he said, heaving the contraband onto a table in the foyer, “this includes two 1996 Meursault-Genevrières, three 2000 Lafite-Rothschilds, Sauternes for the dessert course. I will not live long enough to finish off my cellar so we’re going to start drinking it down right here.”
Jerene sighed. “Such morbidity today.”
“When my heart gives out and I am airlifted to Duke Medical they will remove a brick of your goose fat from my aorta. It’s your Christmas dinner, Jerry, that edges me nearer the grave, otherwise I’d be the picture of sobriety and virtuous—aha, is that the fabulous Alma?”
Alma was setting down a plate of pickles on the buffet table. Once the goose was out of the oven and initially carved, she would take a share of her morning’s cooking back to her own household for Christmas dinner with her own family. This had been the pattern as long as anyone remembered. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Jarvis.”
“You’re looking especially alluring today, Alma. I have millions of dollars. Let’s run away together to my mansion where you can cook and I can have a nice drink while I watch you cook.”
“Still married, quite happily, Mr. Jarvis.” Bo could never tell whether she enjoyed Gaston’s banter (or anyone’s banter) or not. Bo assumed she and his mother had gotten along so well these many decades because they shared a similar lack of humor and steeliness of purpose.
“Well then, my love, I’ll settle for a corkscrew. If there is such an enlightened gadget in this house of temperance and abnegation. Jerene, old girl, you look like a schoolmarm, all pruned up and pursed and ready to hand out conduct demerits. A little wine won’t hurt anything. Not even you.”
Bo watched his mother, frowning, accept defeat. She said, “Just so it’s known that I’m not driving downtown to rescue any of you when you get arrested for your DUIs.” His father was up in a flash at the china cabinet which held the crystal wineglasses, distributing a glass per place setting.
Gaston took the corkscrew from a wordless Alma
, who dodged Gaston’s wayward hand reaching for her apron sash. “If by dessert, this family hasn’t drunk this supply, then I’m fleeing from this annual farce to find more worthy companionship.”
Jerene asked, “Speaking of that, where’s Miss Norma?”
“We’re on parole from each other. She’s become a nag about my finishing this horrendous book. Thought I deserved a break from her caterwauling.”
Jerene’s expression was grim as she collected the place setting for Norma and, with Alma, shifted the places down the table.
Bo, with a smile, asked, “If you hate to write your books, Uncle Gaston, why do it? You’ve made a fortune several times over. You’ve earned a retirement.”
“Alas, Cordelia Florabloom has neither found her fiancé in the Union prisons nor has she met a tragic fate, so my readership doesn’t consider the series over. Norma actively forbids my letting her be gang-raped by Union bummers…”
Dillard from her chair: “Gaston, please.”
“Someone take my ailing sister a restorative glass of Bordeaux,” he went on, pouring from the Rothschild. “You sure, Dillie, this won’t interfere with all your many, many medications?”
“I’m in enough pain now that I truly don’t care.”
Kate went into the living room, clutching two glasses of red, to sit down beside Aunt Dillard and show concern. Bo should have been first to that chore, but he was strangely less tolerant of his aunt than he would have been of one of his congregation, where there were old ladies aplenty with mystery complaints and publicly established maladies. A firestorm of bitter invective awaited the doubters—doctors, nurses, physicians’ assistants, specialists, and now family and friends, all doubting their condition, all incapable of sympathy for such enormous sufferings. Always elderly women, or post-menopausal, estrogen-deprived, aging and often lonely, living alone or with a husband that made for the equivalent of living alone … Look at Kate. How good she is, Bo thought for the millionth time, good to listen to this recital of ailments, taking Aunt Dillard’s hand, shaking her head in sorrow and consolation. That’s all Aunt Dillard wants. Her husband gone two years into their marriage, leaving her and their son, Christopher, behind, then Chris turning so wild and hell-raising, getting involved with meth dealers at college, in and out of rehab, then his death by cerebral hemorrhage at thirty-three, prompted by a reckless cocktail of drugs in his system. Bo figured no one had lovingly laid a hand on his Aunt Dillard since Uncle Randy left her, years ago. So here is her affection and human contact right here, Kate’s little Christian performance, the clasped hand, squeezed tighter with each newly announced ailment.
“We’ve got an hour or so before dinner,” Jerene said, now finished with adjusting the table. “Would you like to have a little lie-down upstairs?”
“More mountain climbing?” Dillard asked tremulously, contemplating the winding staircase of the foyer.
“There’s a wicker couch in my office downstairs, if I move some papers off of it.”
Kate and Jerene cradled Dillard to her feet and began walking her toward the little area that looked out to the back garden, a covered porch that Jerene called her “office,” where mail and solicitations for artistic syndicates and charities could be piled unopened, where Bo and the other siblings had been forbidden to enter just as severely as Dad’s Civil War Study and shrine.
Once Dillard was safely out of hearing, Uncle Gaston started in: “No such thing in my youth as fibromyalgia, although I suppose Victorian neurasthenia was the forerunner. Trilby-like women taking to the bed, invalidism. A long Southern tradition of this sort of thing before du Maurier ever wrote his novel popularizing it, sending legions of girls into faints and missed social seasons spent dying of mystery illnesses from the daybed.”
Kate returned and then Jerene, glaring at her brother, miming a ssssh, finger to her lips.
“We had Geritol! Remember Geritol, Jerry? And Father John’s Medicine. And what was … Lydia Pinkham had a tonic, good for what ails ya! This stuff was advertised on TV. Pretty much alcohol and some mild narcotic to get Ma and Grandma through the boring stay-at-home day. I suppose it’s like kids having attention deficit disorder these days—that’s a crock too.”
Bo began a conciliatory grunt. “Hm. Uncle Gaston—”
“She’s sick,” Kate interrupted. “That’s all there is to it.”
Gaston let his eyes go heavy-lidded and formed his lips into a disbelieving pout.
“If she feels all those aches and pains that the doctor can’t find the source of, then she’s sick. If she merely thinks she feels them, then she’s still sick. If she’s making every bit of it up for attention and has been doing this for a decade, then she’s really sick. There is no way that she is not to be the object of our sympathy.”
“Well said, Kate,” said Duke. “Now where were we, Gaston? Making Annie’s blood boil, I believe, laying out the case for Southern secession.”
Bo was happy Annie was preoccupied fighting the Northern cause—that would keep her busy for a while, and off the topic of religion.
Did the North start the war by reinforcing Fort Sumter? President Buchanan refused to do it, declaring it a provocation, yet Lincoln secretly ordered General Winfield Scott to reinforce the Charleston forts even before his inauguration. What were the South Carolinians to think? If Lincoln freed their slaves—this fringe-party president elected in a four-way race with only thirty-six percent of the vote—then South Carolina would have a population of three million freed and mightily aggrieved blacks and fewer than a million whites. How to prevent the racial cataclysm? Come now, was not Lincoln’s election a legitimate cause for panic among the whites? And wasn’t secession—peaceful, orderly secession—from this so-called union a long-held right implied in the Constitution? Almost all constitutional scholars of the time reasserted the liberty of states to secede.
“Do not say the word ‘liberty,’ Dad,” Annie erupted, “when you mean the liberty to enslave—that is a nonsense, a logical nullity. That is morally bankrupt and preposterous in the eyes of your—nonexistent, by the way—God.”
Bo cleared his throat.
“I’m going to go help Mom and Alma in the kitchen,” said Kate, seeking relocation.
“I ask the chairman,” Annie said, smiling, “to advise and extend my remarks. Certainly no one thinks the Confederate God, pro-Southern, pro-slavery, is the God that should be currently worshipped in America, do they?”
“That god is not God,” Bo concurred.
Uncle Gaston broke in, “Oh that God is just as real as any god any time. The only thing that evolves is the amount of wickedness you can do in the name of God. You can’t enslave or lynch anymore, but the root, mob superstition just finds other channels to express itself. The chief attribute, after all, of the religiously deluded is credulity, fanaticism—”
“Uncle Gaston, please,” Bo began.
Skip Baylor tried to participate. “It’s like Mr. Johnston was saying—”
“When will you ever convert to calling me ‘Dad’ or at least ‘Duke’?”
“It’s like Dad says, the War was a lot about States’ Rights.”
“No it wasn’t.” Annie pounced. “It was about slavery and keeping black people as property on plantations and insuring the fortunes of the whites. Read CSA Vice President Stephens’s ‘Cornerstone Speech,’ which explicitly declares the rebellion is about the God-given power to enslave.”
Gaston, not fully committed, began, “Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson—from New York, mind you—had eloquently shown that union through coercion of the states was unconstitutional. There was a library full of legal documents supporting states’ sovereignty which had to be conveniently ignored to pursue Mr. Lincoln’s war.
“Why do you think they didn’t try Jefferson Davis after the war for treason? President Johnson didn’t pursue a trial because Davis could make the case for secession as well as the legality of slavery—not one court decision ever ruled against those principles. S
almon P. Chase would have presided over the trial and even though he was the first to let a black man argue a case before the Supreme Court, an abolitionist, a Free Soiler, Johnson understood that Chase would acquit Davis for the charge of treason thanks to the understanding of States’ Rights. So there was no trial. Of Robert E. Lee, either.”
Annie: “All of these States’ Rights arguments are mired in spoiled-brat logic. I, the majority sentiment in the state, get to do whatever I want which includes trampling on the rights of the less powerful. I get to pollute or take mountains apart, top to bottom, to get at the coal, destroying the environment downstream for all the poor mountainfolk. I get to keep black people from voting or deny poor people Medicare they’re owed or get to keep black schools inferior or get to criminalize gay people or order the state police apparatus to harass women seeking putatively legal abortions in Kansas and Oklahoma, and if you object, if you say it isn’t just, I will wrap myself in a cloak of States’ Rights and say, ‘Even if we’re prejudiced and ignorant, we get to trample the minority any way we please and how DARE you try to impose federal justice from above—States’ Rights! States’ Rights!’ And you’ll note that all States’ Rights–obsessed states are antiquated hellholes, Mississippi and Alabama and South Carolina, racist, backward plutocracies. And you’ll also note when progressive states assert their rights—like Massachusetts allowing gay marriage or D.C. having strict gun laws or Washington State flirting with assisted suicide and euthanasia, then Bush’s crowd moves the Congress and the courts, heaven and earth, to try to stop it. So what they really mean is States’ Rights When Those Issues Agree with Our Theocratic Backwoods Yahoo Worldview.”
Bo sat there as the older men tangled with Annie. She got the real brains in the family—if only his own sermons had her persuasiveness. And despite an oft-recited set piece or two, she was improvising, haranguing without a pause or a false start.
Jerene came in from the kitchen and banged a copper pot with a ladle, instantly commanding attention. “I heard the word ‘Bush.’ What did I say about Mr. Bush last year? We will not have one more family dinner descend into name-calling and ill feeling over George W. Bush. His name is no longer to be mentioned. We sacrificed 2004 to him, and we will not sacrifice 2007.”
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