So now, with her husband in Hollywood trading on her scheme, Annabelle was left at home with the exciting, glamorous job of entertaining her mother-in-law. Not that she didn’t like Fiona. She admired her. Fiona was like a Norn who had quit the trade, fed up with the absurdities of Gods and Men. That night at Eden, she even showed some of her old skills, managing, it seemed, to read Annabelle’s thoughts.
“Don’t worry about Houghton. I’m sure he’s behaving himself out there,” Fiona said. “He misses you every time he’s gone more than a day. That’s the pure D truth.”
“I know.”
“How’s your father getting by? There’s a man I worry about.”
“My father?” said Annabelle. Last she heard he was sitting in a run-down café on Toulouse Street, its proprietor, half asleep behind the guichet, pouring him a glass of Amer Picon every quarter of the hour. On the rare occasion someone he knew stopped by, Royal would claim to be enjoying a quick drink before attending Lohengrin, even though it had been fifteen years since the opera house burned down. Annabelle said, “He’s doing well.”
“Good to hear.”
Even though she could tell Annabelle was lying about her father—that man had been more brined than a turkey at the wedding—Fiona decided not to pry further into the concern. The girl had always done the same for her. Ever since the day Fiona had walked into the kitchen and mistakenly thought Tewksbury had fallen asleep, Houghton had been trying to convince her to pack up, move across town, and live in one of the spare rooms at The Sweetest Thing. Each time he pressed the issue too far Annabelle would give him a look that meant stop.
The fact of it was Fiona could not leave the house Tewksbury had built for her. Memories decorated it like furniture. Between those walls she had first realized love is not a dot but a line. Under that roof she had first realized love is not a bang but a hum. She’d come to those realizations when, cleaning out the closet, she found Tewksbury’s old medical bag, so covered in dust its leather was more gray than black. He had lost it the day their son was born. On the floor of the closet, where she had sunk clutching the bag in her arms, Fiona cried not because it had belonged to her husband, but that he would never hear her say, “You won’t believe what I found!”
Onto the porch walked the house girl, in her hands a tray of assorted sweets, pralines and chess squares and nougat, each piece nestled in a foil baking cup. She set the tray on a small table. “We’re gracious,” said Annabelle, meaning, “You’re dismissed.”
The hour was getting late. Fiona’s skin had begun to turn seersucker from the evening chill. If she didn’t excuse herself soon, she knew, her daughter-in-law would insist she stay the night. That fresh nougat, though, did look delicious. Fiona’s parents used to sell a special variety at their sweet shop. She had not eaten any since crossing the Atlantic.
“Just one piece. Then I have to go.” The candy was wonderful, Fiona had to admit, better than the kind sold at Wadsworth Confections, not too chewy, not too soft. “Who’d you say made this again?”
“Oh, some new bakery. I don’t recall the name.”
Butterfly Bakery was located near a plantation called China Grove. Several decades earlier, the plantation had been won in a game of Mr. Pan poker, the story of which inspired a screenplay, Five Thousand Acre Hand, by a young writer with few credits at the time, Clarence Braithwaite, whose subsequent career was less than prestigious, including work on the teen sex comedies Pay the Queen and Frat Daddy. The director of Frat Daddy moved on to more reputable fare with Killing Mr. Tiffee, a fictionalized account of the Dixie Mafia focused on the unsolved murder of Larry Tiffee in Lauderdale County, a case said to have been followed religiously by the ailing, bed-prone former governor Paul B. Johnson Jr., whose father, Paul B. Johnson Sr., half a century before the murder case, secretly invited Montgomery Forster to dinner at Lusco’s Restaurant in Greenwood, Mississippi, to discuss an issue Johnson described as “a private matter for a private booth.” They were seated at nine o’clock in the evening on February 29, 1936.
Once the waiter had closed the curtains to their booth, the two men studied their menus by candlelight, neither of them saying a word, their shadows flickering on the booth’s calcimined walls. Johnson broke the silence without looking up from his menu. “Hear you were quite the war hero.”
“That’s what they say.”
“I also hear you enlisted illegally at age fifteen.”
Montgomery was surprised at how surprised he was by the comment. Tonight, even though he didn’t know why he’d been invited, he had expected more cloak than dagger, a desperate request for a campaign donation, perhaps, in a setting that would save face. “Where might you have heard that?” he asked, honestly wanting to know the answer. Since his time in the war almost two decades earlier, Monty had graduated from college and law school, worked as in-house counsel for his father’s company, run a successful campaign for public office, and, over the past three years, served as district attorney, never once being questioned about his military career. How did this man uncover what Houghton Forster had paid so handsomely to hide?
“My investigators are nothing if not thorough.”
“I’m flattered by your interest, Mr. Johnson, but how about we ignore the fact I have a D.S.C. in a shoe box back home that says I served my country with gallantry in the extreme, regardless of my age on enlisting, and instead let’s focus on the question of just why you had your thorough investigators look into me.”
“Know what the French who fought at Belleau Wood nicknamed you?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“L’ombre vivante,” Johnson said, unaware those same words had, a few years after the war, been used for a cloaked vigilante. Speculation remains even now as to whether Montgomery Forster’s exploits in World War I inspired the character introduced in print as “The Living Shadow.”
“You’re not answering my question.” One fold at a time Monty opened his napkin. He’d always found it calming to be fastidious in small operations. “Why did you have me investigated?”
From the other side of the curtain came the voice of their waiter. Johnson answered him by saying they were indeed ready to order. The waiter, materializing before them like a stage headliner, held a notepad, on which he wrote what Johnson ordered for them both, oyster soup to start, porterhouse for the main course, and a bowl of ambrosia.
“Step up from hoop-cheese sandwiches, don’t you think?” said Johnson after the waiter had left. “As a child I used to dream of eating at a place like this.”
“Me, too.”
“Not to be rude, Montgomery, but that’s a lie.”
During the time it took for their soup to arrive, Paul B. Johnson Sr. told an abridged version of his life story, starting with his childhood in Scott County. He grew up poor. His family slept on rope beds four to a room, sharing a linsey-woolsey blanket, cedar smudge keeping the mosquitoes away. Everyone knew to check for wriggle-tails before drinking the cistern water. The boys from town, seeing his bib-and-braces and thrice-handed-down boots, would taunt Johnson. “Runty pig, runt, runt, runty pig.” He never forgot those words while in law school, after being elected a circuit judge, and throughout his three terms in the U.S. Congress. To help the other runt pigs of the world, he decided to run for governor, but that sort of benevolent motive did not guarantee success. Thus far he had lost twice. In retrospect, Johnson told Monty, he felt that what his campaigns had lacked wasn’t “money from someone but rather someone moneyed,” the type of person who had never eaten hoop cheese, a representative of voters from the other half.
“Which is where I come in,” Monty said.
“Which is where you come in.”
“So in other words, you’d like me to be some kind of a stand-in for the upper crust,” said Monty, to which Johnson replied, “What I need you to be, Living Shadow, is my shining diamond.”
The oyster soup did little to settle the queasiness those words brought about in Monty. Ever sinc
e the incident in Ecuador, he had tried to keep a low profile, despite pressure from his father, who’d told him, correctly it seemed, that serving as D.A. would be a good stepping-stone. Monty stirred his soup. “But this is Mississippi. We won’t be running on the same ticket.”
“You just answered your own question. This is Mississippi. Never been a campaign in this state not made possible by handshakes in a back room. You publicly support me and I’ll publicly support you. Two boats rising on the same tide.”
“And you’re not worried,” Monty said, “reporters might find out what your investigators found out?”
Johnson chuckled paternally. “Of course not. I hope they find out! You’re a war hero, Montgomery. That you enlisted while still basically a child makes you even more of one.”
On the other side of the curtain could be heard the sound of sizzling meat. “Careful with the plates,” the waiter said as he parted the curtain, removed the soup bowls, and placed a steak before each man. “They’re hot.” He set two large knives on the table before leaving them to it.
“Not to mention,” Johnson said, cutting into his porterhouse, “you’re a family man.” He paused with a bite held midair on his fork. “How’s your little girl? I heard about what she’s going through. So awful. So awful.”
Monty swallowed, picturing Imogene. What kind of man was he to have gone the entire night without once thinking of his daughter? Just hearing her name made his chest curl into itself. One morning earlier that year, Imogene had been unable to get out of bed because, as she put it, a ghost was sitting on her legs. She was officially diagnosed with polio the following week. Over the past six months Monty had gotten Imogene all the best treatments, renting out a floor at the Mayo Clinic for the season, leasing a Douglas DC-3 to have specialists flown in, but none of it worked. Each of the doctors told Montgomery it was best to move on, and so now he had to watch helplessly as his little girl learned how to be unable to walk.
Even though her father would not be around to see her as an adult, Imogene Forster, indomitable and generous, pragmatic and intelligent, would grow up to be an extraordinary one. She wheeled herself to the podium for her speech as valedictorian of her class at Radcliffe. She refused to take off her glasses when being photographed for the cover of Time. During her relatively short tenure as CEO of PanCola, Imogene managed to increase sales through a strategy known as “cola warfare,” defying not only the supposed limitations of her gender and infirmity but also the fact that, despite protests from many board members, she did not inherit a controlling share of the company on her grandfather’s death. Her brother did.
That brother had not yet been conceived the evening of the dinner at Lusco’s. The necessary circumstances, Monty’s consumption of a fifth of whisky sent to him by a business associate in Ashbrook, England, and his wife’s perforation via knitting needle of her diaphragm, were still eight years away. Known more for her exquisite beauty than for her skills of deduction, Montgomery’s wife, Sarah, giving birth as a new widow, would christen the child with the name she had so often heard her husband mumbling in his sleep. She assumed it was merely a word he found comforting to hear.
Nicholas Forster was born on August 12, 1944.
“Last week they had her fitted for a chair. The doctors say she’s taking to it quicker than any child they’ve seen,” Montgomery said to Johnson, hoping the splinter in his throat could not be heard as readily as it was felt.
As a distraction Monty focused on his steak, the pat of butter melting on top of it, the cracked peppercorns and sea salt big as crumbs. Steam rose from the plate like a charmed snake. Johnson described the logistics of the campaign as both men whittled their meals down to the T-bone.
The waiter replaced their plates with bowls of ambrosia. “We’ll take two teacups—empty—please and thank you,” Johnson said.
“Shall I bring any ice, sir?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Following the advent of teacups to their table, both men grew disinterested in the bowls of pineapple, mandarin oranges, coconut, and marshmallows. Johnson lifted a bottle-shaped paper bag from his side, unscrewed it, and filled each of their cups with three fingers of White Label.
“Your strategy sounds reasonable.” Monty took a long sip. “I like what you said about runt pigs. You could even take it further.”
“How so?”
“If that’s your people, be their champion.”
Three and a half years later, Paul B. Johnson Sr., “Champion of the Runt Pig People,” would be elected the forty-sixth governor of Mississippi, a position through which he gave historically unprecedented support to the state’s day laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers, but at eleven in the evening on February 29, 1936, the future governor, smiling as he refilled their teacups, asked his future lieutenant, “How about you let me handle the campaign slogans?”
* * *
wouldn’t you love to walk a mile in his shoes?
On his way out of the liquor store, Lance Forster read the advertisement for Johnnie Walker hanging above the door—an onyx-black banner with the gold silhouette of a tailcoated man in midstride—and as he made his way back to his hotel, the Jacobs-Allen, he thought that, yes, in fact, he would love to walk a mile in Mr. Walker’s shoes. Anything to get out of this damn town.
He’d been in Detroit a week now. It hadn’t been a particularly pleasant week, either, sitting in his room alone and every few days his associate calling to say that, sorry, the meeting had to be postponed. Lance despised being told what not to do more than he despised being told what to do. He would’ve left town after the first postponement if only the deal weren’t so necessary for him.
In the hotel lobby, heading past the orange decor that, no matter the type of material of each part, be it the cloth of the sofas, the plastic of the light fixtures, or the wood of the side tables, seemed to be made entirely of polyester, he noticed the desk clerk, a girl in her twenties, blond and thin and dressed in a (polyester, of course) pantsuit that was just right for someone blond and thin. Lance walked over and said, “Miss—what’s your name?”
“Laura.”
“Laura, would you have a bucket of ice sent up? Room 1508.”
“Of course, sir. Right away.”
Lance shifted his package from one arm to the other. The clanking of the bottles he hoped made for a subtle invitation. “Awful busy down here.” He looked around at the lobby void of anybody but one bellhop.
“That time of year. February’s always slow.”
“It won’t be February for long. In fact, it wouldn’t be now, normally. Today only comes ’round once every four years. It’s a day without consequences.”
“I guess.”
“You could chop down a cherry tree and get away with it.”
“A cherry tree?”
“If things don’t pick up down here, Laura, feel free to join me. You know the room number.”
For the next two minutes, as he strode across the lobby with one arm swinging and waited for the elevator, posed with one hip cocked, Lance figured the girl must be watching him, thinking, Some people really do have style.
Still got it, he told himself, even at sixty-one.
He did not still have it. The years had been passive-aggressive to Lance. Not quite cruel and not quite kind, they’d left him bloated, pink faced, and saggy about the jowls, but he still had his hair. On occasion, too, his face, despite the bloating, the pink, and the sagginess, caught a good light, and its wrinkles, properly shadowed, looked distinguished. His eyes remained a brilliant blue even when their whites were cracked by a hangover.
Back in his room, plodding over the shag carpet thick as the sideburns on a hippie, Lance went straight to the bar. He unwrapped and arranged bottles of Vat 69, Imperial, Windsor Canadian, Old Crow, Kessler, and 100 Pipers, all the brands that had been on sale. Lance couldn’t tell a difference in the taste anyway. Once the ice arrived—delivered by the bellhop, disappointingly, rather than the
desk clerk—he broke a seal, filled a glass, took a sip, and checked his watch. It was 11:30 a.m. His father always said only lushes drank straight liquor before noon. Lance added a splash of tap water to the glass.
The living room of the suite had a large window overlooking the city. Lance studied the snapshot of Detroit. From the window he could see Washington Boulevard stretching out toward the river. Beyond that lay the rest of the country. What was it the GM president had once said? Lance sipped at his drink, trying to think of the line. Eventually it came to him, but in paraphrased form, mutated by his own recall.
As goes PanCola so goes my life.
Ever since 1967, the year his nephew took over the company, Lance had been forced to watch, helpless and outraged, as PanCola’s stock plummeted. The little shit thought he could reinvent the wheel. PanCola Too? That was like bonking a driver on the head, replacing his wheels with square blocks, and then betting a fortune he would win the race. Lance blamed his father for having coddled Nick. Raising his grandson had helped Houghton overcome the depression he’d fallen into after Monty decided to clean his gun, it was true, but that did not mean Nick should have been indulged by his grandfather so much more than every Forster who’d preceded him. Sometimes, when he was in a generous mood, Lance thought his nephew suffered the worst fate of any family member: unbridled privilege.
That still didn’t excuse him. In the five years Nick had run the company things had gone exactly as one would expect them to go with a man in his twenties at the helm. Sales were down, and profits were low. Panola Cola had dropped to fifth place, for Christ’s sake, behind that redneck drink Royal Crown. Lance had gotten out while the getting was terrible. After divesting from the business, he put all his money into a fledgling car manufacturer, Moretti Motors, which, due to cost overruns and delays in production, was now on the verge of bankruptcy. Today’s meeting was their last ditch.
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