Рита Браун - Tall Tail

“Mignon, sit down,” Penny invited her. “We’re having too much fun.”

“The governor felt sure you were laughing about him with his wife, his daughter, his granddaughter.” Mignon smiled slyly. “How shall I tell him he’s not the center of attention?”

They all laughed. “Mignon, do invite him in. He hasn’t seen Harry in some time. This, forgive me, is Susan’s cradle friend, Mary Minor Haristeen, Harry. We all know one another”—she paused—“too well.”

More laughter, and as Mignon disappeared down the center hallway, Penny conspiratorially mentioned, “He doesn’t know yet about Barbara Leader. He’s so frail and we’re trying to keep his spirits up. You do understand.”

“Yes, G-Mom.” Susan nodded.

“Yes, Mrs. Holloway,” Harry added.

They heard the ninety-six-year-old man shuffling toward them, Mignon at his side. Stepping into the room, he burst into that dazzling smile which had long wooed Virginia’s voters. “There must be a recess in Heaven.” The ladies laughed and then he fixed his gaze on Susan and Harry. “Two good Democrats.”

“Oh, Governor, only one,” Harry demurred. “I’m not good at anything.”

“Nonsense.” He glowed. “Penny, my dear, this calls for a celebration.” He squinted at the mountains. “The sun’s almost over the yardarm.”

Within minutes the drink caddy was wheeled out and Governor Holloway mixed drinks for the ladies, whether they wanted them or not.

Susan and Harry waited until after his toast, then sipped a very good Tom Collins. Governor Holloway came from a generation of men that knew how to mix drinks, what to drink when, and how to hold their liquor. Ladies could drink sherry. Men could not. But anyone could drink a Tom Collins on a summer day. The governor drank his regular bourbon.

Mignon sipped her drink, studying the two women just a few years older than her.

Millicent Grimstead told “the girls,” as she thought of them, “Daddy’s writing his autobiography. Miss Skipworth is helping and Daddy declares she’s a whiz at research.”

Mignon demurely lowered her head a moment. “The Internet speeds everything up.”

“Does, but news can’t be weighed. Everything is presented as though it is of critical importance. I believe this harms the political process,” the governor pronounced.

“Governor Holloway has such a deep understanding of, I would say, statecraft.” Mignon flattered him, but it was true. “This will be a very important book.”

“Think I’ll call it Move Over, Jefferson, ” the aging gentleman joked.

“Daddy, how about Where’s the Party? ” Millicent Grimstead joked right back.

“Sugar Pie, I’d be shot on publication day. It’s so partisan now, so crude. You can’t govern without compromise, and what passes for public servants today are narrow-minded ideologues. There, I’ve said it.” He held up his glass.

The others held up theirs. “Hear, hear.”

As Penny leaned toward her daughter, the resemblance between the three generations of women was remarkable. “Sam really must tell his story. The good, the bad, and the ugly, as they say. We all made mistakes, that’s human, but we learn from them, and I will brag on my husband. First he served in the war and truly was a hero—”

The governor interrupted her. “Honey, now, there were fourteen million of us in uniform.”

“Sam, your ship was torpedoed and sinking, and you, a young JG, leapt into the water and stayed there, swimming to help other men, pulling them to life rafts. You were the last sailor to be hauled onto a life raft.”

“Honey, the war was filled with men who died for their comrades. I was lucky. I lived and”—he paused, dropping his voice dramatically—“came home to Virginia and married the prettiest girl in the state.”

“Oh, Sam.” She blushed.

They married in 1949, raised two daughters, and never stopped loving each other. Harry wondered why some couples draw together and others don’t.

Mignon pretended to pout. “He won’t tell me those things.”

The governor grew serious for a moment, “Ladies, if you’ve seen war, you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Daddy, I know that’s true because you never talked about it to Pauline and me, but we now have—what?—three generations of men who have never served. That’s frightening.”

“Yes, it is.” His voice deepened. “Getting rid of the draft was a disaster. I learned to trust men I would have never met in any other way and they learned to trust me. I believe, I truly believe, that one of the reasons politicians today don’t cooperate together is they don’t know one another. I knew smart-mouthed boys from New Jersey and laconic cowboys from Idaho, and if I didn’t value them at first I sure learned to value them in good time. Our units weren’t integrated by race—that came later in a big way. I think that was a mistake, not preparing us in World War Two. We might have had name calling and fistfights, but we would have worked it out. What came later was a disgrace, and I was part of that disgrace.”

A silence enveloped them until Susan Tucker said, “G-Pop, it was a different time. You apologized, you worked hard once you understood. I am proud of you.”

His eyes misted, and he leaned toward his granddaughter. “Little Susie, you don’t know what that means to me.” Then he drew a deep sigh. “You get old. Your mistakes are underlined. You forget that you might have done a bit of good. And I assume no one cares much except for my family, but even you, Precious, when you were in your teens you seemed to me to live in another America.”

“G-Pop, I had to learn, too.”

Driving back to Harry’s farm, where Susan had left her car, Harry said, “You did a wonderful thing. We forget to tell old people, we forget to thank them.”

“Back when I was a little brat, all I wanted to do was hide the fact that my grandfather was Governor Samuel Holloway. And now what pains me is when he dies, the damned media will rake it all up again, how he refused to desegregate the schools. How he defied Washington. The man apologized on his eightieth birthday. He apologized for how long it took him to understand, and he did make good on it! My grandfather has worked harder than anyone I know to raise money for scholarships to the University of Virginia and Duke, his two alma maters, for people of color. It took me a long time to see him for what he is: a man of his class, race, education, time, and gender. The new world had to seem like a repudiation of everything he worked for, and I was part of that repudiation.”

“We all were, and mostly we were right. Change comes hard. Who knows what we’ll bitch and moan about?”

“I already know. You bitch and moan about the weather.” Susan laughed.

“Getting back to school desegregation.” Harry impishly smiled. “Sure gave us a lot of schools named for saints. Every church in the state fired up their own school.”

They both laughed.

Susan then said, “Fortunate we didn’t have to go through that. It was mostly over and done by the time we reached high school. But if there had been a school for you and me, a saint’s school, it would have been St. Rita’s.”

“Why is that?” Harry puzzled.

“The saint of impossible causes, and Harry, you are impossible.”

Thursday, September 9, 1784

Attached to a sash, a long, heavy cloth, six feet by four feet, was being slowly unfurled above the dinner guests. Francisco Selisse had observed such an arrangement in the rice country of South Carolina. Not only did it provide welcoming light breezes, it blew away the flies, which had been exceptionally persistent this summer. Waving the sash was an African American child of nine, dressed in summer livery, trying not to die of boredom.