Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Unlike Edwin, Chuck eats rapidly and without style, shoveling in the elaborate dessert as if it were so much alfalfa, while he continues his narration. He has seen most of the standard tourist attractions, he tells Vinnie, but none of them impressed him much. Some actually seem to have offended him-for example, the Tower of London.

“Hell, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but an old abandoned prison. From what the guide told us, it sounded like a lot of the historical characters they shut up in there shouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. They were good guys mostly. But they jammed them into those little stone cells about the size of a horse stall, without any heat or light to speak of. Most of them never got out again either, from what he said. They died of some sickness, or they were poisoned or choked to death or had their heads chopped off. Women and little kids too. I can’t figure out why they’re so damn proud of the place. If you’ve ever been in jail it could really give you the willies.”

“I see what you mean,” Vinnie agrees politely, wondering if Chuck has ever been in jail.

“And those big black ravens out in the yard, prowling around like spooks.” Chuck makes his thick hands into talons and walks them slowly across the green-veined marble. “Jailbirds, I guess you’d call them.”

“Yes.” Vinnie smiles.

“Where I come from, birds like that mean real bad luck. I figured maybe that’s what they put them there for, the guys that built the place. So I asked the guide, was I right.”

“And what did he say?” Vinnie is beginning to find Chuck rather entertaining.

“Aw, he had no idea. He didn’t know anything, he just had this spiel memorized. He showed us what he claimed was the crown jewels, we had to pay extra for that. Wal, it turned out they were only copies, fakes; the jewels were colored glass. The real stuff is locked up somewhere else. Hell, anybody could see that: the crowns and all look like what guys in the Shriners or Masons would wear to some big do.”

Vinnie laughs. “I remember thinking the same thing, years ago. Costume jewelry, I thought.”

“Yeh, right. I complained to the guide, said he must think we were suckers, charging extra for something like that. He got real nervous and huffy; he was kind of a dope anyhow. But I have to admit he was the exception. Most of the people I’ve met here, they wouldn’t mind that kind of talk. They don’t keep telling you how great they are, how they’ve got the biggest and best of everything. They kinda make fun of themselves, even; you can see that from the newspapers.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Y’know, we’ve got a lot of boosters back in Tulsa. Smile, accentuate the positive, keep your eye on the doughnut, that kind of thing. It can get you down, ‘specially if you’re down already. Oral Roberts University, you ever hear of that?”

“No,” says Vinnie, who has but can’t remember why.

“Wal, it’s this college we have in Tulsa, founded by one of those TV preachers. Their idea is, if you’re a Jesus-fearing man or woman and go to church regular you’ll get ahead in life, win prizes, succeed in business, anything you want. It used to sound pretty harmless to me. You lose your job, you see the flip side of the pitch. If you aren’t producing, you’re some kind of sad Christ-forsaken weirdo. Hey, that reminds me. What I wanted to ask you in the first place.” Chuck lowers his spoon. “I got this idea from that book you lent me on the plane, about the American kid who goes back to England, where his grandfather is a duke or something. I forget the name.”

“Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“Yeh. That’s right. Wal, it reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid, when I was working on a ranch with him summers. He used to talk about how we were descended from some English lord, too.”

“Really.”

“I’m not kidding. Most of our ancestors back in England were just plain folks, he said, but there was one called Charles Mumpson, the same name as him and me, back around Revolutionary times, who was some kind of great lord. He lived on a big estate down in the southwestern part of the country and was a famous local character. Kind of a wise man. He didn’t sleep in his castle, my grandfather said; he stayed in a cave out in the woods. And he wore a special costume, sort of a long coat made from the fur of about a dozen different animals. He was called The Hermit of Southley, and people came from all over the countryside to see him.”

“Really,” Vinnie says again, but with a different intonation. For the first time she feels a professional interest in Chuck Mumpson.

“So anyway, I got the notion that while I’m here I should try and look up this guy and find out more about him and all our ancestors over here. Except I don’t know how to proceed. I went to the public library, but I couldn’t locate anything, I didn’t even know where to start. The trouble is, these dukes and knights and things have a lot of different names, sometimes three or four to a family. And there isn’t any place in that part of the country called Southley.” He grins, shrugs. “I tried to phone you, to get some help, but I must have taken down the number wrong. I got a laundry instead.”

“Mm.” Vinnie naturally doesn’t explain that she had deliberately altered one digit of her number. “Well, there are some standard places you might look,” she says. “There’s the Society of Genealogists, for instance.”

While Chuck writes down her suggestions, Vinnie thinks that his quest is also standard: the typical middlebrow, middleclass, nominally democratic American search for a connection with the British aristocracy-for “ancestors,” a family history, a coat of arms, a local habitation, and a noble name.

Conventional, tiresome. But the particular details of Chuck’s family legend are intriguing to a folklorist: the eccentric lord and local sage clothed in a patchwork of furs in his woodland cave. Mad deistic philosopher? Follower of Rousseau? Herb doctor? Wizard? Or even possibly, in the local folk imagination, the incarnation of some pagan god of the forest, part beast and part man? Half-formed wraiths of a short but rather interesting article stir in her mind. It also amuses her to think of Chuck as, in a debased and transatlantic form, the final incarnation of this classic folk figure-by coincidence, from the southwestern part of his own country and dressed in assorted animal skins.

When the bill arrives, Vinnie, as usual, insists upon paying her share. Some of her friends attribute this to feminist principles; but though Vinnie accepts their interpretation her policy well predates the women’s movement. Essentially, it reflects a deep dislike of being under obligation to anyone. Chuck protests that he owes her something anyhow for her advice; but she reminds him that he got her a ride to London on the Sun Tour bus, so they are now quits.

“Wal. All right.” Chuck crumples up Vinnie’s pound notes in his large red fist. “You know, you remind me of a teacher I had once in fourth grade. She was real nice. She…”

Vinnie listens to Chuck’s recollections without comment. It is her fate to remind almost everyone she meets of a teacher they had once.

“Anyhow. What I wanted to say is, it looks like I’m going to be in London a while longer. Maybe we could get together again sometime, have lunch.”

Vinnie declines tactfully; she’s awfully busy this week, she lies. But why doesn’t Chuck let her know how he gets on with his research? She gives him her telephone number-correctly this time-and also her address. If he really wants to find out anything, she adds, he’ll probably have to go to the town or village his ancestors lived in, once he discovers where it is.