American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Imogene was still an actual virgin the week of her uncle’s wedding. On the second-floor gallery, she watched as cars filled up the driveway, looking for boys—men, she reminded herself, men—her own age, college students whose parents made them come.

  Unfortunately, most of the somewhat few people invited to the wedding were distant relatives, Teagues or cousins of Teagues, Wadsworths or cousins of Wadsworths, people Imogene often thought of as the Un-Forsters, a formalism she would later modify in an ad campaign for CitraPan. They were mainly there to kiss the proverbial ring. Although Houghton had rented out three floors of the recently refurbished Batesville Inn, he’d offered The Sweetest Thing as an informal place of congregation, noting in the invitations that guests should come by for cocktails and food once they had settled into their rooms. Lunch was close to being ready. From the back lawn Imogene could smell a Pan-basted hog roasting on a spit.

  “Where y’all going?” she yelled at her grandfather and Nicholas, who had emerged from the house and were walking toward the garage.

  “Ride around the place,” Houghton called back. “We won’t be long.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Sorry, honey, but I still haven’t gotten seat belts put in the Jeep yet.”

  The U.S. military had given Houghton the Willys MB as a gift following World War II. It had been used by the company’s “technical observers,” employees assigned to set up bottling plants behind the lines, who were better known to most soldiers as Panola PFCs. Houghton loved it more than any of his other vehicles, using it to survey the estate as a planter would his farmland.

  Today he wanted to talk with his grandson about the meaning of a birthright. They were driving down a rutted dirt road that cut at a diagonal through the property, passing open fields that looked like golf links, shallow ponds girded by overgrown thickets, rolling hills, dried creeks, and all kinds of trees throwing shadows along their route. Houghton pointed them out to Nicholas—pecan and water oak and cypress and walnut and maple and sweet gum. “What’s that one there?” he asked, pointing ahead.

  “Ash?”

  “Elm.”

  “Why are we out here, Granddaddy?”

  Nicholas wished he were back at home, watching as the guests, all those different types of people like these different types of trees, showed up for the festivities. Instead he had to ride around in this awful heat surrounded by a whole bunch of nothing.

  “We’re out here because one day this will all be yours.”

  “Really?”

  “And not just this. The company, too. Yours and yours alone.” After downshifting, Houghton turned onto the trail that ran along the perimeter of Eden, defining its border. “I want to be sure you deserve it. Understand? It’s a lot of responsibility. Think you can live up to that kind of standard?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The rest of Nicholas’s life would fall decidedly short of the standard Houghton had in mind. Ask any gossip columnist from that era. Middling in academics but socially popular, Nicholas attended Phillips Exeter, where he was president of the student council, captain of the squash team, captain of the baseball team, and a film critic for The Exonian. Then, like most people who didn’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, he pretended Dartmouth had always been his first choice. He enrolled in 1962, the same year his unknown cousin, Robert Vaughn, was born. After college, Nicholas held a number of positions, interning for a Mississippi senator, acting in an Off-Broadway play, but none were more important than his role as, to use his blind-item name, “The Soda Jerk.” British model Penelope Tree became his on-off girlfriend after they met at Capote’s Black and White Ball. The car he sponsored placed respectably at Le Mans. His polo team defeated Cibao-La Pampa in an overtime chukker. Such playboy antics, however, were relatively brief. In 1967, over a year after he had come of proper age, Nicholas decided to replace his sister at the head of PanCola, proving himself, as Imogene would later put it in a section of her autobiography that her editor at Penguin insisted she cut, “the very embodiment of deceit, a man whose conception had been unwanted by his father and was only made possible when his mother, from what I’ve heard, started using her diaphragm as a pincushion.”

  “You know, you look like him,” Houghton said to Nicholas as they rode around Eden. It was an old joke between them. “Have I told you that yet?”

  “Nope. Never.”

  Nicholas’s grandfather told him he looked like his father just about every single day. It was difficult for Nicholas to see a resemblance. He considered the old guy in the portraits and photos around the house to be just that, an old guy, not the magical preincarnation of himself that his grandfather seemed to see in them. “What would’ve been his is going to be yours,” Nicholas’s grandfather said as they took a dogleg south.

  “Neat.”

  From where they were now riding, an old game trail next to a long meadow, it was possible to see the main house off in the distance, smoke rising from the cookout in its backyard. Annabelle watched them through the kitchen window. Sunlight flickered off the jeep’s windshield like Morse code as they drove along.

  She looked down and realized the whiskey she had been pouring into her lemonade was overflowing the glass. Damn. She had only meant to float a tiny bit on top. So far the day had been its own kind of hell, welcoming guests for the wedding, getting them fed, trying to remember all their names, such that a top-off was just what she needed. While taking a hand towel to the spilled whiskey, Annabelle looked back out the window, wondering if Houghton was trying to avoid dealing with their guests, or trying to avoid her.

  They had been losing touch ever since the day, fifteen years ago, when he told her he wanted an open marriage. Although Houghton never admitted it, Annabelle had always figured it must have been another woman that prompted his request, that he had met some young piece in Los Angeles, where he’d been spending a lot of time for work, and, thinking it would somehow be fairer, wanted her, Annabelle, to have a lover as well. What a coward’s move. A real man would have asked for a divorce. Instead, a sort of truce had settled into their marriage, one in which the two of them, Houghton and Annabelle, remained faithful in infidelity, neither of them asking the other about their dalliances. Throughout all fifteen years of their open marriage, though, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to flirt, let alone sleep, with another man.

  Annabelle set aside the towel, looked away from the window, and took a sip of her lemonade. The problem was she loved her husband. God damn him to hell, but she loved the bastard! Despite the usual, fixable problems—his long hours spent with work and her difficulty showing affection—the closed version of their marriage had been wonderful, the kind other couples, much of the media, some of the public, and their own relatives thought to be a ruse. Even their sex life had been great. After the unhinged lustfulness of their early years, when their locales veered toward the semipublic, a new position was attempted each day, and they often accessorized more than their attire. Annabelle and Houghton successfully made the transition, one other married couples frequently failed at, into sex that was not just fun but playful. The routine they liked best started with her singing him a lullaby. “Sleep My Baby” was a favorite, as was “Toora Loora Loora.” In bed, while she sang, he would slowly undress her, both of them grinning at the childish words, their debauched intent, or a combination of both, and then they would attempt to make, grinning and giggling, the very thing for which the lullaby was intended.

  “We’re running low on champagne for the mimosas, Mrs. Forster,” said one of the house servants, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Shall I get another case from the cellar?”

  “Yes, please. Go ahead and make it two. Is Mr. Forster’s mother here yet?”

  “She arrived fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Better bring up a case of Beefeater as well.”

  In the other room, coincidentally if not fortuitously, Fiona was drink
ing the last sip of her second gin rickey and looking for somebody to bring her a third. She couldn’t find anyone. Houghton must be understaffed. Closing in on a hundred years old, still upright but only with the help of a blackthorn stick, Fiona had a mind to give her son a what-for—just as Tewksbury’s had before he put in, her vocabulary had turned fully southern—but, thank heavens, a server appeared by her side with a fresh rickey.

  Beneath a triad of palm-leaf fans in heavy rotation, she wandered through the crowd of relatives she barely knew, brushing against watered silk, overwhelmed by the smell of rice powder on cheeks. Many of the guests were distant Wadsworths, Fiona’s name before she married Tewksbury. Although she had not grown up particularly well-off, it seemed the family store, Wadsworth Confections, had become a success, with branches throughout England and other parts of the continent, selling products from its two main suppliers, Cadbury and Harrington. Her so-called cousins kept coming up and asking where they might find Houghton, mentioning they wanted his “impartial advice” in expanding the business to the States.

  “Grandmother,” said Lance as he walked over. “Like you to meet my fiancée.”

  Fiona, glad to be near someone who was a direct rather than an extended part of her blood, said hello to her grandson and his fiancée, Karen. “Such a beautiful girl.”

  “Thank you,” said Karen.

  “And young. Shouldn’t have any trouble making a grandchild.”

  Lance laughed awkwardly. “Now, Grandmother.”

  “I’d love to have another girl in the family,” said Fiona, leaning in conspiratorially. “Tell me, Karen, have you heard about the rhythm method?”

  “Okay, it was good visiting with you, Grandmother.”

  With his arm like a shepherd’s crook around her waist, Lance dragged Karen off the vaudeville stage that was his grandmother’s presence. “Sorry about that,” he said as they bobbed through the crowd, accepting handshakes, giving handshakes, telling people it was lovely to see them.

  “Don’t be sorry.” Karen gripped his elbow. “I thought she was a hoot!”

  In fact she thought this whole ordeal was a hoot. Her family back in Toronto hadn’t been much of one. They had all but disowned her when she moved to Los Angeles, her father saying she would be taken advantage of, her mother saying she would be broke in a month. Neither of them was completely right. True, she had gone to a number of “private casting sessions” in order to get some part, but in Karen’s opinion, she was the one taking advantage of those producers, not the other way around. She had always wanted and needed people to like her. Didn’t most actresses? Here at Lance’s home, surrounded by his family, Karen felt a similar want and need except for something else, for the bond that seemed to exist among all the Forsters. What that bond was she could not quite say because it had been so scarce among her own family.

  Decades later, in a short obituary for his grandfather, Robert Vaughn would expound on the bond Karen was trying to identify when he wrote, “One emotion twined his family members together, the same one that led to the creation of a product that made them famous, and that emotion wasn’t hatred.”

  * * *

  Near ten o’clock, after all the guests had gone back to their rooms at the hotel, Lance sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for the house to go to sleep. He was prepared this time. At half past, he crept to his bedroom door, turned the knob, and carefully began to open it.

  Cotton growled.

  “Who’s a good boy? Cotton. That’s who’s a good boy. Aren’t you, you little shit?” Lance whispered as he reached into his pocket, where he had placed a hunk of pork wrapped in a napkin. He tossed the pork a short ways down the hall. The dog glanced at it but then turned back to Lance, lips curling up, ears going stiff on top of its head. “I take back what I said. You are the worst boy.”

  * * *

  Across the hall, Ramsey tiptoed out of her daughter’s bedroom, thinking what a good girl she’d been this entire trip. It was the oddest thing. Back in California, Susannah took forever to fall asleep, asking for a glass of water, her night-light to be turned on, or one last bedtime story, which, in Susannah’s case, meant a chapter of Austen. Tonight, though, she had drifted off almost immediately, the scent of bougainvillea and hum of crickets drifting in from the window and filling her room, a swath of moonlight touching her pillow. Ramsey, as she closed the door behind her, thought this wouldn’t be such a bad place for a girl to grow up.

  * * *

  Houghton, whose death a year from that night would prompt his daughter to bring her daughter to live for a summer at the house, sat on the edge of his bed, horny as all hell. It didn’t seem particularly natural for a man who was almost eighty to want to have sex this bad. He was alone in the master bedroom. Fifteen years ago, despite his objections, Annabelle had insisted he keep their room, and she would take a smaller one across the hall. They had not had sex since then. Houghton had not had sex at all, with anyone, since that day.

  Even though the open marriage had been his idea, he would hold up his hand there, not a day passed that he didn’t consider it a terrible one. He had thought it was the only thing that would save their marriage after he found out she was cheating on him.

  The only actual proof of Annabelle’s infidelity came about a month before Houghton asked for an open marriage. Around that time, he had been traveling more than usual for work, stopping unionization among his bottlers, creating low-interest loan plans for vending-machine owners, signing contracts with airlines, learning how to enter the age of the refrigerator. While he was away Annabelle started making frequent trips to New Orleans for no apparent reason. Her father had died five years earlier. She had not stayed close with her childhood friends. Houghton could not think of any reason his wife would have for going to Louisiana. On a day when he was back home, he discovered one when, by accident, he overheard her talking on the phone.

  “I told you not to call me here. I told you not to call me at all,” Annabelle was saying into the receiver when Houghton happened to walk past the study of The Sweetest Thing. “Yes, yes. I know. I’ll come down next week. Okay. I love you, too.”

  Near the bottom of the stairs, Houghton Forster, CEO of one of the most successful companies in the United States, had to sit down because the universe had just cracked apart. His wife was cheating on him. Not only the love of whatever accounted for his life, nor simply the mother of his children, she was the woman whose approval he always sought, whose touch sent a ripple through his entire body, the one person in the world who could make him think, All you have to do is ask. Without her Houghton never would have even discovered PanCola’s secret ingredient.

  Was it possible to let her go? The concept of a divorce felt as foreign to him as a trip to the moon. He could not imagine being without the love he had leaned on all these years. She was his Annabelle constellation. He’d be lost if she weren’t there to show him the way home. For those reasons, Houghton decided to let his wife be with whomever she wanted, to be happy without guilt, in the hope, desperate and unspoken, that an open marriage would keep her from leaving him.

  Fifteen years after that decision and two nights before the wedding, Houghton sat alone in his room, wondering if Annabelle was still awake over there in her own. Probably not. He told himself to get some sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a madhouse.

  * * *

  In her bedroom Ramsey was helping Karen try on her dress, downstairs Annabelle was asking Miss Urquhart for coffee, behind the stables Susannah was giving Nicholas unwanted dance lessons, on the porch Imogene was telling Branchwater about college, scattered throughout the front lawn florists were decorating chairs with smilax and a carpenter was erecting a small altar and waiters in plainclothes were situating epergnes on tables beneath a party tent, and back inside, sitting at the top of the staircase, Harold was in a state. His hand latched onto his ear. He rocked back and forth on his heels. All the commotion recently was just too much for him. Over the past few decades, as his brothers
and sister left, Harold had been the only one to stay behind at The Sweetest Thing, and during that time, he’d come to think of himself as its caretaker. The quiet suited him. With the approach of the wedding, though, his world had been flipped topsy-turvy, the house overrun with relatives, strangers actually, people asking him what he did for a living, whether he was married, how many children did he have. The kitchen staff was too busy to fix him his usual clabber with nutmeg for breakfast. Branchwater kept saying he didn’t have time to play a game of “Running Water, Still Pond.” Even his own father forgot to give him his tobacco tags for his collection. Haddy had to find them in the trash among all the half-eaten hors d’oeuvres and lipstick-stained napkins thrown away by the wedding guests who had invaded his home.

  “Calm down, buddy row,” said a muffled voice by his side. A big hand gently pulled Haddy’s own away from his ear. “Sssh. You’re all right.”

  Haddy was shocked to see the hand didn’t belong to Branchwater. “What do you want?” Tears trembled in his eyes, as though he were underwater and his brother Lance stood looking at him from above the surface.

  “Just checking on you.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I know you are,” Lance said. “I know you’re okay.” He sat down on the stairs next to Haddy. Making amends. Was that not how people foolishly put it? Lance wanted to make amends with his brother. Build seemed a more apt word: nail by nail, board by board.

  “Has Mother told you about how the wedding’s going to work yet?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Remember when Monty got married? How the groom had groomsmen and the bride had bridesmaids? Instead of doing it that way Karen and I are going to have one special person up there with each of us. Ramsey’s going to be Karen’s maid of honor, and I want you to be my best man. Think you can do that? Be my one special person up there?”

  The knots in his back loosening, Harold said that yes, he thought he could.