“Something old, something new…” murmured Charles, sipping his drink.
“Something Scarlett,” said Geoffrey. “The wedding belle. A formal wedding is every woman’s chance to star in Gone With the Wind. For a few short weeks she is the bride, able to throw scenes, to make people wait on her, and to be the absolute center of attention. This is how she thinks she ought to behave. It has very little to do with the institution of matrimony, as far as I can tell. It’s an ancient and terrible ritual. We’re in for it, I tell you.”
“So if Cousin Elizabeth starts throwing tantrums, we tell her to put a sock in it.”
Geoffrey shook his head. “It’s not going to be that easy.”
Clearly intending that to be his exit line, Geoffrey strolled toward the door, but their conversation had reminded Charles of something. He motioned for his brother to stay. “Listen, before you go, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” he began awkwardly.
“Yes, Charles, what is it? Do say that you are asking me to recommend a good hairdresser, because I have been so hoping-”
Charles scowled and swept a dark forelock away from his eyes. “I don’t need a haircut!”
Geoffrey closed his eyes dramatically. “Perhaps a defoliant…”
“What I wanted to ask you was-” He was blushing furiously. “Oh, this is ridiculous. Never mind!”
“Now you have gained my attention,” Geoffrey announced. “Out with it, Charles. What advice can I offer? A tailor’s reference? Singing lessons, perhaps? Have you been mispronouncing wines?”
“No.” Charles was sullen, as people usually were after more than ten minutes of Geoffrey Chandler. “I’d like to know how you meet girls around here.”
His brother favored him with an acid smile. “In your case, Charles, I should recommend setting snares.” This was Geoffrey’s second attempt at an exit, but this time his curiosity got the better of him. “Just what is going on?” he demanded. “And why come to me? Surely you know that Mother would be delighted to throw you to the social wolves if you so much as indicated your willingness to go.”
Charles paled. “No. I don’t want to attend dances or anything like that. I’d just like to meet someone nice. It’s time I thought about settling down with someone who’s my type. You know, involved in the sciences.”
“What a pity for you that Typhoid Mary is no longer with us.” Geoffrey deemed that exit line too good to pass up, and so he left.
Jenny Ramsay was touched and pleased to hear from her old friend Elizabeth after so many years, but she did not share her friend’s elation about a marriage day that coincided with the birthday of Princess Diana. In a way, Jenny had been Princess Diana for several years now and quite often she found it a royal pain.
This was one of those times.
As usual, she was impeccably dressed: pink linen suit, ruffled blouse with a satin ribbon at the neck, and her trademark double strand of cultured pearls. Her hair was a smooth, blonde bob, perfectly disciplined to stay in place, just short of her tiny gold earrings, and her heart-shaped face was carefully made up to look not made up at all. She wore her usual expression of sincere and urgent interest, suggesting that the present discussion of gardening strategies and shrubbery upkeep was the high point of her week.
In fact she was bored shitless. (Not an expression that anyone had ever heard Jenny Ramsay use, but she thought it a lot.) In her capacity as honorary chairperson and goodwill ambassador to the rest of Georgia, she was attending a board meeting of the local County Beautification Committee, and her fellow committee members had been holding forth for a good hour and a half, which is a long time to have to smile and look fascinated by utter drivel. Jenny was trying to think of a plausible yet foolproof way of escape.
Jenny Ramsay had graduated from college with a sorority pin, a C average, and a degree in communications, which she hoped to parlay into a career in show business. In the spring of her senior year, she had entered the local pageant of the Miss Georgia contest, in hopes of gaining some media attention, useful to job seekers who are short on marketable skills. Thanks to several years of aerobics classes with her sorority sisters, she looked all right for the swimsuit competition (though it felt rather strange to be parading around a crowded auditorium with hardly anything on). “Take out your contact lenses,” a pageant official advised her. “It’s a lot easier if the audience is just one big blur.”
The evening-gown event was delightful. She had worn a turquoise ball gown that needed only a wand to make her look like a fairy princess, and she was sure that the judges gave her higher marks than anybody in that category.
Jenny’s real problem with the pageant was the talent portion of the program. Jenny couldn’t sing-and her notions of dancing involved a drunken DKE for a partner and a very loud dose of beach music. It was then that she discovered she had entered the pageant fifteen years too late. The true contenders had been competing since the age of four, when ambitious and farsighted mothers enrolled them in piano, ballet, and modern-dance classes. On the advice of one of her communications professors, Jenny ended up doing Emily in the last act of Our Town, but she lost the crown to a cellist from Milton’s Forge, whose ambitions were to become a speech therapist and end world hunger.
The pageant had not been a total loss, however. One of the judges had been an executive from the local television station, and he had seen a perky quality in Jenny Ramsay that he thought would add just the right spark to the Channel Four news team. They already had the anchor duo-Bill (an overgrown Boy Scout) and Victoria (dark-haired and serious)-and sports announcer Badger Darnell, whose knee injury had sidelined him from a pro baseball career. Jenny was young and inexperienced, but the station thought that with a little coaching, Jenny Ramsay could corner the ratings for north Georgia.
She was hired to announce the weather on the six o’clock news, but although the public saw this as her principal function, it was, in fact, a small part of her duties, mostly involving reading prepared forecasts supplied to the station by actual meteorologists. Jenny’s part in the process was to wear cute outfits, read the teleprompter with accuracy and convincing sincerity while pointing to the correct spot on the map (you had to know which one was Alabama and which one was Mississippi), and to function as the so-called little sister of the news team. Jenny was the one who cooed over feature stories about animals and who talked about snowball fights with Badger when snow was in the forecast.
The station’s plans for Jenny involved much more than telling people whether or not to take umbrellas to work. They wanted a princess. Local news teams were small-town America’s answer to royalty, they reasoned. Actually, they didn’t reason it, as hardly anyone in television ever comes up with an idea independently. What they did was to go to a broadcasters’ conference in Chicago, where they attended a seminar on “The Rating Value of News-Team Members as Community Celebrities.”
The workshop speaker had, in fact, explained to the audience that media personalities performed the same functions in Middle America that the British royals did for the public in the United Kingdom. They lent their names to worthy causes, rode in parades, and served as figureheads and spokesmen for various civic projects. For the royal family, the rewards were an allowance from the civil list and a few castles to live in; for their American counterparts, it translated into ratings for the news-team celebrities’ television station.
The Channel Four executives discussed this revelation on the plane back to Atlanta and they decided that of their four newspeople, perky blonde Jenny Ramsay had the most potential for the role of community royal. She was wholesomely pretty rather than sexy, so that while men would find her attractive, women would still approve of her; she was young, inexperienced, and unmarried, which meant that her salary was not great, and her chances of relocating were small; and best of all, she was not terribly bright, which meant that she could discharge the endless social functions without going insane from boredom. Jenny Ramsay, the Weather Princess, was Channel Four’s answer to prayer.
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They sent her to Atlanta for two weeks of charm school, in which she learned to walk like a model, moderate her Southern accent for the benefit of a microphone, and to turn her best side toward the cameras. Her instructors brushed up her table manners, fashion sense, makeup skills, and posture. When Jenny Ramsay came back from Atlanta, she was not perfect, but after a few months’ practice she acquired the polish to seem perfect. Although, as news anchor Victoria remarked privately, “The light in Jenny’s eyes is the sun shining through the back of her head,” most people were too dazzled to notice what a dim star she was.
The one thing that coaching had not taught Jenny Ramsay was the Manner. That she had learned on her own. It had not happened overnight, but gradually, Jenny had come to realize that all celebrities have a public persona as well as a private self. It isn’t acting, exactly, and it isn’t necessarily insincere; it’s just a way of coping with strangers who expect to be treated like old pals.
After a few months of appearing on Channel Four, Jenny began to receive fan mail from people who obviously felt that she was one of the family. We have dinner with you every night at 6:15, one of them wrote. Strangers began to hail her by her first name in the supermarket, and people would stop her on the street and tell her long, pointless stories about themselves, or ask her personal questions, like whether she was married and what kind of car she drove. At first these intrusions were frightening to Jenny, because she thought that the intruders might be planning to kidnap her or drop in for breakfast or something equally repugnant. Finally she realized that people liked talking to her because she was famous, and that later they could recount their conversation with her to the guys at the office.
The station assigned her to be the March of Dimes chairman and the parade marshal. After they had her read children’s letters to Santa Claus on the air and the newspaper pictured her cuddling the animal shelter’s pet-of-the-week, she became the Patroness of the Valley. Thereafter, she could no more snub her constituents than Congressman Williams could.
By that time Jenny Ramsay had learned what the public expected of her and she could give it graciously on an instant’s notice. She called it Sparkle Plenty, after the character in the Dick Tracy comic strip. Sparkle Plenty meant that you smiled in public much more than anyone actually does and that you showed a degree of enthusiasm otherwise limited to two-year-olds and puppies. The voice, too, took on a quality of delight and emphasis that was quite absent from one’s private conversations. When greeting her fans, she spoke in italics. “How nice to mee-eet you! It is soo-oo sweet of you to say so! My autograph? Well, of cour-rse!” Jenny had learned that if you didn’t do that-if, in fact, you treated people as you normally treated your friends and family-they thought you were reserved or stuck up. But Sparkle Plenty was a very tiring activity. After a daylong broadcast from the county fair, Jenny found that her whole face ached from the muscle strain of constant smiling. Still, she was thoroughly proficient at it, and one always came away from an encounter with the Weather Princess feeling that one was her true friend, that she was “just like anybody else.”
She Wondered how she ought to act at Elizabeth MacPherson’s wedding. Technically, of course, it was a private occasion, requiring the participation of the private Jenny Ramsay, and not the Channel Four Weather Princess, but lately it had seemed to her that she was recognized every time she went out in public, so that now she had to put on full makeup and dress clothes just to buy a quart of milk. Jenny was beginning to wonder if she could be Jenny Ramsay in any gathering at which strangers were present. She would have to see how it went.
A voice from the endless drone of the meeting interrupted her reverie. “What about you, Jenny? How do you feel about Dusty Miller?”
Jenny summoned a perky smile. “Great! My folks have a bunch of his records.”
An instant later she remembered that this was a beautification meeting, and that Dusty Miller must be some kind of damned plant, but the committee members laughed merrily. Later they told people that Jenny Ramsay, while perfectly natural, was much wittier than she seemed on television.
Geoffrey turned off the Channel Four six o’clock news just as Jenny Ramsay was assuring a Stetson-wearing majorette that it would not rain on her parade. “I believe she is traveling in a mice-drawn pumpkin,” he muttered. “How else could it take this long to get here from Virginia?”
“Antique shops,” grunted Captain Grandfather from behind the pages of the Chandler Grove Scout. “Outlet malls. Even petting zoos. I think Elizabeth would stop to watch grass grow if somebody advertised it on a roadside billboard. Her mother’s the same way.”
“Well, if she doesn’t get here soon, I shall be off to rehearsal,” Geoffrey announced, in tones suggesting the magnitude of her loss.
“She’ll probably wait up for you, Geoffrey. Keeping decent hours is something else she’s not known for.”
“I never could understand why early risers were so smug about it,” said Geoffrey, for whom mornings were only an ugly rumor. “They go to bed at ten and get up at seven, and they act like they ought to get gold stars for doing it! That’s nine hours sleep; while I, who go to bed at three A.M. or so, never get that much sleep. So, I ask you, who’s the sloth?”
“You get more done if you get up with the chickens,” said Captain Grandfather.
Geoffrey managed a frosty smile. “I much prefer owls. They’re smarter.”
The sound of a horn from the driveway diverted his attention from the argument. “About time!” he said, stalking out of the room.
Elizabeth’s white hatchback was parked in the circular driveway as close to the side door as she could manage. She was already hauling a collection of bags and parcels out of the backseat and stacking them on the concrete.
“Oh, good!” she cried, seeing Geoffrey approach. “I was afraid I was going to have to carry all this by myself.”
“What? No footmen?” Geoffrey inquired.
Elizabeth made a face at him. “You’re going to be absolutely unbearable about all this, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Unbearable is such a subjective thing. I plan to enjoy myself hugely, though, which may prove annoying to you.”
“I expect it will,” said Elizabeth, handing him a totebag full of books. “You usually manage to make me feel like a perfect fool.”
“When, alas, my goal is ever to prevent you from being one.” He inspected the totebag and drew out the topmost book: The Royal Wedding. “Too late, I see!”
“I refuse to be cross with you, Geoffrey,” said Elizabeth with a little laugh. “This is going to be the happiest day of my life.”
“Yes,” said Geoffrey. “I was afraid that it might.” He flipped through the book, solemnly studying the color photographs of the glass coach, the sailor-suited page boys, and the red-liveried horsemen in the wedding procession. “And is this a portent of things to come? I’m afraid Chandler Grove doesn’t run to landaus, but the high-school pep club could probably fix you up a float with some pastel toilet paper and twenty feet of chicken wire.”
“I don’t want a royal wedding,” said Elizabeth between clenched teeth. “But I would like a lovely and memorable ceremony, since I hope to do this only once.”
“Leave the bags here,” said Geoffrey, setting the books down. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Shouldn’t I go in and say hello to everyone else?”
“They’re watching Jeopardy,” said Geoffrey. “You may as well wait until that’s over if you want them to notice you. Come on.”
Elizabeth looked for a long minute at the white castle across the road, and then with a little shudder she turned away. “All right,” she said. “But let’s not walk toward that.”
“It is rather ominous, isn’t it?” said Geoffrey. “I see it every day, and yet it still gives me chills. It’s strange how you remember someone who has died violently, even if you weren’t particularly fond of them.”
Elizabeth nodded. “I know, but I truly don’
t want to think of him just now. Do you suppose that my coming here to have the wedding will bring back sad memories of Eileen?”
“Perhaps,” said Geoffrey. “But at least you will be making new memories to overshadow the old ones. That may help.”
They walked around to the back of the house, where a well-tended lawn gradually gave way to a field of tall grass that stretched a hundred yards or more to the edge of the woods.
“It’s so beautiful here,” said Elizabeth, stopping to admire a bank of cabbage roses. “It makes the twentieth century seem far away.”
“Well, it is,” said Geoffrey. “Unfortunately, one must commute there.”
“Yes. I don’t know where we’re going to live. It’s very hard to manage with two careers.”
“I should have thought that your two particular careers might make it easier than most,” Geoffrey observed. “Obviously, he has to be near an ocean, on account of the seals, and you will find that there are dead bodies everywhere, so it shouldn’t matter where you live.”
Elizabeth frowned. “There’s a bit more to it than that.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First comes the wedding. Now, you are sure that you want to do this? Because I have seen you go off on some tangents that would make the Flying Dutchman seem carefully navigated.”
“It isn’t a whim,” said Elizabeth softly.
“Well, I do rather like Cameron. He isn’t the wet dishcloth you usually become enamored of. I suppose he knows what he’s doing?”
“You will have to ask him,” said Elizabeth dryly.
“And all this undue haste isn’t just to meet the Queen? I have to tell you it sounds like a silly reason for getting married.”
“You sound like Bill!” said Elizabeth, regarding Geoffrey with considerable surprise. “I haven’t ever heard you sound so serious and responsible.”
“I am Captain Grandfather’s understudy,” said Geoffrey with a grin. “Which you may take as a warning that you will probably be having this conversation again.”
The Windsor Knot Page 7
