Flying Shoes (11 page)

After her children, she hadn’t felt the old joneses and self-destructive compulsions. At least not as much. And of course with babies around there wasn’t a lot of time for clowning around. It wasn’t that she was such a devoted mother, into reading ridiculous “parenting” books and “making memories” and her own baby food and crap; in fact she was a little afraid of her children, she loved them so much and their very existence had so much power over her. She mooned over them and worried about them, but fought it, following Liddie’s advice: “Treat children like house plants. A little neglect is good for them.” Which was in direct opposition to her own poor mother’s MO, to overprotect, at least after Stevie died. When Eliza and William were born it became crystal clear to her what love was. What you felt for your children was the purest, most intense, most primal and true feeling a person could have. Everything that you felt for any other human being was about something else: lust, convenience, vanity, power, neediness, companionship, pity. What you begat was as good as it got. That was just about the only thing in this world of which Mary Byrd was one hundred percent confident and convinced. But there still were the challenges—disturbing jack-in-the-boxes like Ernest, an oddball who sniffed out the weakness of character in her and preyed upon it. At least she didn’t, as she heard that a couple of ladies in town did, go down to Sneed’s Hardware and troll for some of the hot workmen who came in and out all morning, or go up to Home Barn in Memphis, the new place for guys to hook up with bored housewives hobby-shopping for lamps and pillows. Anyway, it wasn’t her business.

They’d grown up so differently, Charles Byrd Thornton and Mary Byrd D’Abruzzi. She wasn’t sure if those differences had eased or afflicted their union, but it kept things interesting. On his mother’s side, Charles’s family, the Byrds, went right back to the seventeenth century when they’d arrived in Virginia from London to what would become Richmond with little but some family expertise in goldsmithing, and no gold­—and with the intention of establishing themselves as aristocrats. Who would have been around to challenge the notion? The Indians with whom they traded furs? Of course, that pretense was abandoned by the Revolution. Charles’s great-great-great grandmother was a daughter of William Byrd II, who’d founded Richmond and built himself a beautiful house with the James River lapping at its front door. A fortune was made in tobacco farming and shipping, and in establishing Richmond as a port and commercial center.

Not a lot was known, or talked about, anyway, of the less illustrious Thorntons, Charles’s father’s people, but like all white Southerners, they knew, or made up, something
.
A Thornton had come over to escape some
unpleasantness
in Warwickshire, England, and had built a log cabin and settled a tiny place called Coldfield in the mountains in the northwestern part of Virginia. His progeny became talented gunsmiths working in the Harpers Ferry Arsenal, where one of them supposedly designed the Harpers Ferry Rifle, a sort of magic wand to disappear Indians, Tories, and other frontier resistance, although the arsenal superintendent there, an associate of George Washington, took all the credit for the invention. Subsequent Thorntons worked there, too, and after John Brown’s bloody foray and then when the Confederate army claimed Harpers Ferry, they were only too happy to remove themselves and the arsenal’s machinery to Richmond, where they developed the Richmond Rifle, a copy of Harpers Ferry Model 1855, which proved somewhat less successful at beating back and disappearing Union troops. After the devastation of Richmond, and there not being enough money or business to go around, some of each family—Byrds and Thorntons—had gone west to Mississippi to start over, trading in their farms and ships and guns for law and medical degrees and academic appointments.

Charles, like Mann, had been sent back to Virginia for prep school—Woodberry Forest was a good choice for smart, bad boys from Mississippi—and college at Washington and Lee.

By Byrd and Thornton standards, Mary Byrd D’Abruzzi—she’d never taken her stepfather’s name, Rhinehart—was a latecomer to Virginia. All four of her grandparents were right off the boat from Italy at the turn of the century, settling first in Norfolk, where her D’Abruzzi grandfather had worked selling fish, then pots and pans, before moving on to Richmond. There, he’d gone to work for the Velatis, an old Italian family that had been making caramel candy since before the Civil War. He’d done well enough with that that he started a little business repairing, then making, shoes. His pièce de résistance was the D’Abruzzi Boot, a heavy-duty but light leather brogan that was cured and softened with olive oil, making it very comfortable to wear, and the rich, rustic color of walnut pesto. The grids of fine steel cleats on the soles made them tough and durable, and in the 1960s and ’70s, “Bruzzi Boots” became popular not only with workmen but with trust-fund hippie kids who wanted to create the illusion of work with their carefully negligent, proletariat wardrobes. Mary Byrd’s dad joined him in the business. There wasn’t exactly a fortune, but the D’Abruzzis became firmly and proudly middle-class, moving from Oregon Hill to the West End, acquiring a summer cottage on the Chesapeake, and sending Mary Byrd, the first grandchild, to William and Mary and her brothers, Nick and James, to the University of Richmond. Her D’Abruzzi grandparents had died—her grandfather of something in his brain, maybe the French disease, or maybe tanning chemicals; Mary Byrd hardly remembered them—and her parents had had their marriage annulled and both had remarried when she was just a kid. She rarely saw or heard from her father; not, she chose to think, because he didn’t care, but because he was so busy with his new family and new life in New Jersey, where he’d relocated the business. It was just coincidence that she and Charles shared the name Byrd.
Or almost. Mary Byrd’s mother thought that the association with a First Families of Virginia name, and a double name at that, sounded uptown, and heritage-y, and perhaps would give her daughter an advantage in life. Perhaps.

Mary Byrd had met Charles and Mann at a fund-raiser for the Valentine Museum in Richmond, where she had a part-time curatorship. Charles was learning about photography and the gallery business, coming out of his bad, short first marriage, and Mann was trying to come out of his closet. She was charmed by them both. She and Charles married two years later and they all settled back in Mississippi, Mary Byrd and Mann connected by their outsiderness and secretive natures, Charles and Mann connected by their prep school boyhood, and who knew what else, and all of them connected to the Virginia Tidewater.

Welcomed graciously into the Thornton clan, Mary Byrd tried to adjust quickly, striving to become more WASP than wop. More stoic, more civil, more reserved, less self-focused. More Melanie than Scarlett. Raised to disdain temperamental outbursts, Charles could ignore yelling, door-slamming, and, years ago now, tears. In fact, on the occasions that Mary Byrd had employed crying to get Charles’s attention, it had backfired, and Charles had clammed up and withdrawn. Emotions, particularly the unhappy ones, in his view were somewhat tacky. Charles had grown up with his family’s disbelief in headaches, naps, or psychiatric help; god forbid one would talk to—pay money to talk to!—strangers about private matters. Self-indulgence, drinking excepted, was not good, either. And so, from the Thorntons Mary Byrd had learned to live more serenely, not think so much about herself, and to drink seriously. She believed it was a more civilized day-to-day existence. Gin and tonic in the insane hell of a Mississippi summer, bourbon or martinis in the damp, bone-chilling winters. Wine was nice but just more of a pleasant accompaniment to a meal, and plain old beer was more suitable to most Southern cooking. In Charles’s family neither wine nor beer constituted drinking anyway, and were actually more of a pain in the ass to procure: the peculiar liquor laws in the town permitted buying and consuming gallons of hard liquor but not even one single can of cold beer. Go figure.

So Mary Byrd had settled in to the sort of nineteenth-century, Deep South way of her husband’s people. And she had to admit that a little of her Italianness had rubbed off on Charles. It didn’t happen often, but when he found himself with her family, he learned not to be alarmed at the aggressiveness and hyperbole that was part of their DNA: they weren’t
really
angry all the time and didn’t
really
want to kill each other, and food was to them what booze was to the Thorntons: civilization. Charles loved the succulent peasant dishes that Mary Byrd cooked; perhaps his biggest concession to her messy, Mediterranean soap-opera upbringing.

Mary Byrd dialed Mann again. It rang a long time; she wouldn’t blame him if he was screening her calls. Even Mann had his limits, and if he had any idea of why she was calling, he should not pick up the phone. But he did, asking a cautious, “What?”

“I forgot that Wiggsby is supposed to come by, and we’ve got to take him to dinner.”

“
We
,
white man?”

“Mann, you have to! Charles won’t even be here for drinks; he’s doing some stuff with a gallery guy from D.C. He said he’ll meet us at the Pink Palace. Please! You
have
to come over. He’s got some new prints we can look at—those ones he’s been taking at the casinos.”

“I just rented a movie. And he’s such a Nazi.”

“
Please
. I’ll be your best friend.”

“You already are my best friend. Lot of good it does me.”

“Please, Mann. I won’t let him be mean to you.”

“
Ugh
. You
so
owe me.” He hung up.

Mary Byrd put half the spaghetti back in the box and the chops in the freezer. No time for that; she’d have to downgrade again. Reaching for two plates for the children—the shamed Corelle—she noticed that one of her favorite knickknacks was a little bit broken. Just a little bit—the tip off an ear of one of a pair of dancing kitties. Probably one of Evagreen’s “accidents,” the hallmark of which was an object just a teensy bit lost or broken, or scratched, or dinged in some barely perceptible way. Nothing, of course, was ever said. For Mary Byrd it was a small price to pay for Evagreen’s efficient, military presence and, she would have to admit, the consistency she provided in their chaotic lives.

She looked in the fridge to see what she could scare up for hors d’oeuvres. Not that Wiggs ever ate anything, the fistful of spaghetti excepted. And she did have plenty of liquor. She wished she could call Mann back and ask him to pick up some of his favorite yummy triple-cream cheese that he had caused to be present in the funky cheese shelves at the JFC, but he was already too pissed at her to be either hit up for another favor or appeased. Just as well; the children couldn’t stand the oozy sight or smell of it. They called most adult cheeses “fromunda—you know, from unda your butt. She found some little green tomato pickles she’d put up last summer, some huge capers, a little soppressata, and a nub of rat cheese and arranged them on a plate. She heard the front door open and Mann walked slowly down the hall to the kitchen, dragging his feet dramatically as if he were headed to the dentist, or the electric chair at Parchman. His petite self did look precious wearing a very tailored jacket, jeans, and a yellow and pink bow tie.

“I really hate you,” he said wearily.

“I know you do. But I
love
you and I will make it up to you.”

“You can’t possibly.”

“Yes, I can. What about my precious little lawn dog?” she said. “Little Jimmy T?”

“Shut up,” Mann said.

She was busily fooling with the boiling pasta, tearing salad greens, and buttering bread.

“Well, if you were only interested in
me
giving you a payback blow job.”

“You know what? If you’d just wear that dykey Armani jacket and put a bag over your head I might go for it.”

From a distance, or not even from a distance, Mary Byrd could look scarily like a myopic fifteen-year-old boy. Once, when she was helping out in Eliza’s first-grade classroom and her moppy curls were cut too short, a kid had made Eliza cry by announcing loudly, “Yo mama look like a
man
.”

From then on, for school functions, Mary Byrd tried always to wear a mom costume: a dress, or at least slacks and a froufrou sweater, dangly earrings, plenty of eye makeup and lipstick.

Mary Byrd drained the pasta, spooned sauce over it, and added a Wishbone-dressed salad, which she knew would be ignored, and a slice of leathery JFC French bread to each of the plates.

“I’m going to let the children eat upstairs to minimize the chance of horror,” she said to Mann. “Get whatever you want to drink.”

“What do you want? ’Tini? I’ll make it.”

Leaving the kitchen with a big tray, she said over her shoulder, “Oh, hydrocodone on the rocks for me, please.”

Mann poured himself a glass of the already-opened mediocre Chianti on the counter, almost wishing he had brought one of the delicious bottles he had sent from Mr. Brown, his wine guy in New Orleans. But then he wouldn’t have wanted to waste any of it on Wiggs. Or on Mary Byrd, for that matter, who’d guzzle anything.

Maybe, for helping to entertain Wiggs, Charles would give Mann one of Wiggs’s beautiful photographs. It was annoying but a fact of life that some of these brilliant artists could be such a pain in the ass. Plenty of the writers and artists who came around town were just
boring
, apart from their work, Mann thought.