“We all understood. But I think you would have been excited about this particular project.”
“I’m sure I would have. So tell me everything.”
He smiled.
“Alana Delafosse is quite a lady.”
“Yes, she is.”
“The mayor called me in March, and told me he wanted a small subcommittee—actually it turned out to be me, Tom Landrieu, and Mary Phillips—to listen to Ms. Delafosses’s proposal concerning what she was characterizing as a summer festival.”
“Yeah. I’d heard her mention something like that.”
“Well, we met in the old library. She talked, and, I admit, we were skeptical. We had already voted money to redo the mansion, but so much was going on. And when she really went into the particulars of the scope of the thing: New York actors, major national film companies—for a while we were just looking for a nice way to tell her ‘no.’
“I can imagine.”
“But she didn’t quit. And we kept having meetings. And the numbers she kept bringing in were—frankly, they were astonishing.”
“What kind of numbers?”
“Ten million dollars.”
“Jackson, we’re spending ten million dollars to put on this production?”
“No, we’re making ten million dollars.”
“What?”
He grinned.
“I know. It’s hard to believe. But—well, you were at the play last night, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That whole thing at the end, that Salzburg thing?”
“The Salzburg Music Festival. It’s famous.”
“Apparently. But what Alana pointed out to us was, that it didn’t always exist. Salzburg in the early nineteen hundreds was just a sleepy little village, almost dying, because nobody could make money mining the salt beneath the city. The salt that had made it famous centuries before.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Neither did we.”
“Alana probably learned it in Russia when she was training to be an assassin.”
“Alana never was in Russia and she never trained to be an assassin.”
“You’re no fun. But go on.”
“Salzburg got to be Salzburg because of a guy named Max Reinhardt, who looked at the city and said, ‘Hey, let’s put on a play!’ And they did. And they are still.”
“What did Salzburg have that Bay St. Lucy doesn’t have?”
“Maybe a few old castles, Jackson pointed out, “but we’ve got the ocean. We’ve got a beautiful little town full of artists.”
“And we have money.”
“That we do. Anyway, it turns out Alana had already started contacting people—she’s good at that—and a miracle happened. Whole bunch of them, actually. Alana somehow made contact with The New York Shakespeare Society and offered them a cool million dollars if they would come down here and produce Hamlet.”
“Had you authorized her to make such an offer?”
“Of course not; you think we’re crazy?”
“My fault. I’d just forgotten for a second or so that Alana was Alana.”
“Well, she is. Anyway, apparently the New York Shakespeare Company has bills to pay too, and the Reddington/Barrett couple has their ten thousand dollar a month upper West Side apartment to maintain—and they all just said, “We could use a million dollars, let’s go to the beach!”
“Ok, but I still don’t understand…”
“Other people got wind of it.”
“What other people?”
“The Arthur M. Vining Foundation.”
“Who are they?”
“A foundation. They give money to support art. So, by the way, does Amalgamated Petroleum, who just happens to have an offshore drilling rig two miles out from here.”
“Publicity, publicity.”
“Everybody found out about it; and everybody wanted to be involved, nobody more so than the entire state of Mississippi.”
“The state is involved?”
“Of course. That’s why the governor is here today.”
“The governor of Mississippi is here today?”
“Nina, you just walked right past him.”
“I thought that was the president of France. I guess I should know those two people apart, shouldn’t I?”
“Well, you’re retired.”
“I guess that justifies it. So why does the state want to get involved in a Shakespeare production?”
“Mississippi is sensitive about our reputation.”
“Our reputation?”
“Yes. The word around the country is that the people of Mississippi are, well…”
“Stupid.”
“Well, intellectually challenged.”
“We have learning differences.”
“Yes, or at least that’s the reputation. So a great cultural event by the sea could be extremely valuable.”
“Wow! So Alana Delafosse waved a million dollars around…”
“And we’re going to make ten times that.”
“Incredible.”
And, just as she said that word, the rain stopped.
And after it did, nothing noteworthy happened in the rest of the month of May.
Except there was one memorable event.
It happened Thursday evening, when she visited Hope Reddington, for a light dinner.
She and Frank had always fit into the Reddington’s circle of friends, so mutual invitations had been frequent. She had been in the house several times, and had always loved it. It was not the Robinson Mansion. It was in a different section of Bay St. Lucy, where the trees were not as stately and magnificent and the people were not as stately and magnificent. But both sets of living creatures––trees and people––had done all right for themselves. They were upper middle class trees and people, who exuded in comfort and conviviality what they might have lacked in lineage and wardrobe. They shaded each other. Low to the ground, hard working, and efficient, they shared a flora/fauna appreciation for cracked-with-time sidewalks, ambulatory and not decorative. The trees shaded these sidewalks not because they were obligated by God to do so, but because the sidewalks seemed to attract them down, invite them as it were. And the people walking on the sidewalks shared something in common with the trees themselves, not passing helter-skelter over the concrete on their way to some encounter or another, but standing rooted in it, as the sun set, and they chatted aimlessly about the turning of the earth.
It had been their neighborhood––Nina’s and Frank’s––for the last twenty years of their lives together.
“Nina!”
“Hello there, May Belle!”
Since Hope was in her eighties now, she was aided in many aspects of housework and the daily obstacles to living by various members of the church. It was not a formal arrangement, nor would these ladies, Nina knew instinctively, ever have accepted money.
But they were there often, getting a bit of breakfast together, making coffee for Hope and whoever happened to stop by at eight in the morning.
Bringing by a spot of lunch.
Offering rides into town and back.
And making a light supper for Hope to offer Nina.
“Isn’t the news about Helen exciting?”
This from May Belle Witherspoon, tall and gaunt, her silver glasses stuck absent-mindedly upon a bun of hair, her apron flopping busily as she walked down the front stairs and out onto the driveway, where her own stately Buick sat behind the Reddington Oldsmobile, which had sat motionless for the last several years.
“Hope is fit to be tied, you know!”
“I’m sure,” Nina answered, “that she is.”
Nina approached the house. It was all porches and gardens, various brown-brick Georgian columns sprouting here are there, seemingly not supporting anything at all but just keeping the building planted deep into the earth.
“Do you like cucumber salad?”
“Love it,” she lied.
Cucumber salad bei
ng the only salad in the world that Nina actively disliked.
She had no idea why.
“You know they’re going to stay here!”
“What?”
“Helen and her husband. The actor. They’re going to stay here!”
“Really?”
“Yes, Hope just got a call from Helen a few days ago! The two of them are going to stay in Helen’s old bedroom. It’s being fixed up now! No one has slept in it since Helen left Bay St. Lucy five years ago.”
“That’s incredible. Hope must be so excited.”
“Oh, she is, she is! Come on up—watch the front stairs, they’re a little rickety. I’ve set dinner out on the back porch so the two of you can watch the sun set over the bayou. I must tell you, I don’t know which one Hope is more excited about: her granddaughter coming home or Nina Bannister coming to have dinner with her!”
“Well. It’s been a long time. Frank and I used to come over all the time. I have a lot of memories of this place.”
And she did, and they all came flooding back as she walked into the entrance ante-room and then into the main living room itself.
The house was possessed by the past and had no role to play in the present. It was musty, of course, as such houses always are, dust particles whirling and dancing like little chains of DNA molecules in light beams thick as tree trunks that always seemed to be glowing golden through great six foot high windows, no matter what time of day it happened to be.
But the air’s lack of movement was secondary in importance—at least in terms of placing the house in any chronological relation to the rest of time—to the fact that all of the people living in it were dead.
They were not mournfully dead.
They were simply happy to be what they now were, pictures hanging on walls, or sitting on grand pianos, or propped on coffee tables, or hanging down on gold chains from the vaulted ceilings—and smiling in gray, muted tones that exuded good memories.
It was a happy house, and always had been.
Outside of it had occurred those things—sickness, fatal automobile accidents—that are both a part of life and the end of it.
But they had not been allowed in here.
And so as Nina walked carefully, almost reverently, through the dining room with its great oaken table and silver tea service, and through the kitchen with its ranges and coolers and cabinets and spices—and through the back parlor where sat a golden harp that had been played by Helen, and before that, her mother—
––as she walked through these places, she could swear she was hearing, mixed with her own breathing and the creaking of wooden floorboards—the sound of utter stillness, laughing softly.
“Nina, won’t you sit down?”
They were on the back screened in porch now. A white wrought iron table sat directly beneath an overhead fan, which rotated slowly emitting an almost imperceptible growl of gears. Just beyond the far screen wall, almost close enough, Nina thought, that she could reach out and touch it, flowed Plaquemine’s Bayou, making its stately way into the gulf, twenty feet wide here and shining orange/brown in the setting sun.
“Hope is still in her room, getting ready.”
“That’s all right. Tell her there’s no hurry.”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“I would, May Belle.”
“Of course. Here you are.”
The coffee was poured. Nina sipped, then set her cup on the table and looked up:
“You won’t join me?”
“I should go and check on Hope.”
“But you will be joining us for dinner?”
May Belle shook her head.
“I’d love to. You know I would. But I have to go home and get dinner ready for the family. As for cleaning up…”
“Don’t worry about that. You know I’ll help her.”
A smile of immense relief, like the smile one emits after learning that the tumor is not cancerous.
“Oh would you?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you so much! Hope is very independent still. But you know, after a certain point it gets difficult.”
“Don’t worry, May Belle. I’ll be sure she’s all right for the night before I go.”
“Thank you, Nina. I won’t give it another thought, now that I know you’re here. But—if you’ll just excuse me a small minute, I want to be sure she doesn’t need any help.”
And May Belle Witherspoon was gone, sucked into what had always been the welcoming arms of Reddington hospitality.
And, Nina mused, sipping happily on the coffee that had been given her, still was.
She sat for perhaps five minutes, losing herself in various memories of various evenings out here, where they would all chat about this or that, the men sometimes fishing for catfish in the bayou, the women content to point at stately egrets standing in foot deep shore water, motionless, watching the current eddy past.
When was the last time?
It had to be ten years ago.
Think, Nina—
Helen is now twenty-three years old
She was seventeen when she left for Interlochen.
The accident had occurred two years before that.
Nine years.
What came into her mind was a summer evening, balmy as this one. She and Frank, Paul and Laura––and the sound of the harp being played by Helen, back there, in the parlor.
While the bayou made its way timelessly toward the gulf.
Helen, the very young Helen––who had no idea about the accident to come that was to claim the lives of her parents, nor the marvelous adventures that were to befall her in Interlochen and New York––had that very night been able to look down on its waters from her own bedroom window.
Moon River.
A bayou and not a river.
Not wider than a mile.
But crossing it in style she certainly would be.
She and her husband, one of the greatest actors in the world.
Coming back to sleep with her in her childhood bed.
And how would she feel about that?
“Nina!”
These reveries were interrupted by the appearance of Hope, who exploded into the doorway and tottered her way out onto the porch, hurtling at two to three miles an hour and panicking both Nina, who thought of jumping up to catch her as she was certain to fall forward, and May Belle, who thought of grabbing her from behind since Nina would certainly be too slow to do any good at all.
“Hope! It’s so good of you to invite me!”
Incredibly, nothing disastrous happened, and with a bit of chair scraping and “oh don’t bother I’m fine—ing” and “no no it’s all right—ing,” Hope was seated and pouring coffee into her own cup.
“Are you sure you won’t stay and eat with us, May Belle?” she asked.
“I can’t, Hope,” replied May Belle, who had somehow gotten over her panic and had time to both return to the kitchen and bring the salad bowl.
“Husband calls, I know.”
“Yes he does. And big ole’ teenage boy, too. Now—salad’s out, you’ve got silverware, and plates and dressing—anything else?”
“No, we’re fine! Now you get back home and take care of your family.”
“I will. Good night you two.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
And, save for a fish plopping near the pier, and a water bird yowling mournfully as it skimmed its way over the bayou current, Nina and Hope were alone.
On her own back porch, Hope no longer seemed to feel the need of looking up and out from under something. She did on the other hand seem to feel an equally pressing need to avoid being heard by something; and so she leaned forward, making the legs of the table scrape against the hardwood porch floors, while, her grinning face poised directly above a serving bowl filled with what appeared to be Bleu Cheese dressing, she paused.
For one second. Two seconds.
Listen, listen…
> Three seconds. Four seconds…
…then the secret.
“July 6.”
The grin only broadened, while Nina pondered her response to this communication, this number, this enigma.
She could not bring herself to be so stupid as to ask something like, “So what’s happening on July 6, Hope?”
Clearly she was supposed to have known the burning question, whose answer was “July 6.”
It was like one of those game shows, in which the contestant, having been told the answer, is to guess the question.
But for the life of her she couldn’t think of any she could have asked, the answer to which would have been ‘July 6,’ except the question, “What day comes two days after the fourth of July?”
Which she did not want to ask.
And so she simply waited.
The grin only broadened.
We will be, she told herself, here all night.
Then a stroke of brilliance hit her and she said:
“So that’s the big day, is it?”
Hope exploded in joy.
“Yes! Yes, I’ve only learned of it today! July 6, Tuesday afternoon, at 8:00 p.m.!”
The dazzle of the brilliant idea seemed to have faded a bit by now, but why not ride things as far as possible?
“So then—things will start happening.”
Another explosion of joy.
“Yes! Yes!”
But how long could she keep this going? How long could she avoid saying, “So what things will begin happening, Hope?”
“Do you think you’ll be ready by then?”
The grin disappeared, there replaced it an expression of pure panic, and finally an atmosphere of calm and resignation.
“Yes. Yes, I believe everything will be done. When Helen and her husband arrive, her room will be ready for them. All of the workmen have assured me of that.”
Thank God!
Hope and her husband were arriving on July 6, at 8 p.m..
Now maybe they could eat.
They did so, with Hope chattering on about this and that, all subjects fair game and relevant as long as they were Helen and her famous actor husband. Nina got a few words in here and there, mostly about the splendor of the cucumber salad and about how she had always loved cucumber salads and about how her mother had made wonderful cucumber salads and about how much Frank had loved cucumber salads and of course it was all lies, lies, lies, but there wasn’t much else to talk about.
Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) Page 6