MacPherson's Lament

CHAPTER 2

“I’M NOT GOING to be here this afternoon,” said A. P. Hill. “Can you manage by yourself?”

“By myself?” Bill MacPherson looked up from his paperwork. “You mean alone? Abandoned? What about Edith?”

“Try to bear up, Bill. It’s Edith’s day off, remember? Tuesday afternoons and all day Friday.”

The law firm of MacPherson and Hill was now ten days old, still solvent, and boasted a caseload of half a dozen clients. They had also engaged a part-time secretary-receptionist: Edith Creech, a recent graduate of the local business college. Edith’s salary was as modest as her grade point average. She was maddeningly slow at office work and her spelling showed a creativity that bordered on genius, but she was a notary public, a useful asset to a law firm, and she was thoroughly in awe of her attorney employers, which went a long way toward offsetting her shortcomings.

“And where are you going this afternoon?” Bill wanted to know.

A. P. Hill reddened. “I’ve got an appointment,” she said, in a tone calculated to discourage further inquiry. “But you should be all right. Have you heard from Trowbridge yet?”

“Yep. He called this morning with his first question. It’s a doozy. Are you ready for this? He wants to know: if a neighbor’s tomcat gets the Trowbridge tabby in the family way, can the tomcat’s owner be sued for child-er, kitten-support?”

His partner rolled her eyes. “Oh, just say no!” she advised.

“That’s easy for you to say, Powell,” Bill grumbled. “You’re a Republican. But Old Trowbridge wants chapter and verse. I did inform him that the kittens would have to have blood tests to prove paternity.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll come up with something. Did you remember to check the mail before you came in?”

“Yes. That’s the other thing I was going to tell you about. You know that newspaper ad we ran? Did we say that we were catering in legal services to the deranged or anything?”

“Why?”

“They seem to be seeking us out. First the Trowbridges and now this.” He held up a flowered envelope. “This letter came today, addressed to us-MacPherson and Hill, Attorneys at Law. Dear Sirs: If it is entirely convenient with you, I shall be calling on Friday afternoon at one o’clock to discuss a small legal matter in which I should like to avail myself of your services. Sincerely, Flora Dabney. And-get this, Powell-Miss Dabney has enclosed a picture of herself in costume.”

“Let me see that!” A. P. Hill snatched the picture from her partner’s outstretched hand. From the sepia photograph a lovely but earnest-looking young woman gazed back at her with big, intelligent eyes. Flora Dabney looked a proper Edwardian gentlewoman in her coat with wide lapels and a frilled blouse with a jabot of lace at her throat. Her dark hair was brushed away from her forehead and tied with a ribbon at the back, a style that eschewed glamour, but did not hide her wholesome good looks.

“I think I’m in love,” said Bill.

“She looks too intelligent for you,” said A.P., handing back the photograph. “She doesn’t say what she wants?”

“No. Women seem determined to be mysterious in my presence. Where are you going this afternoon, by the way?”

His partner smiled sweetly. “Just out. Now try not to do anything that will get you disbarred.”

Bill was still laughing merrily as A.P. left the office. She glanced at her watch. Nearly one o’clock. Just as well that she’d packed her gear this morning. She hated to leave the car parked downtown with the rifle in the trunk, but it couldn’t be helped. Now she had to go into the ladies’ room and change. It wouldn’t do to show up in her present outfit: a pink linen coat and skirt and high heels. Better stow them in a locked briefcase in the trunk, just to be safe, after she changed into her other set of clothes.

Anyone loitering about on the sidewalk in front would have insisted that A. P. Hill did not leave the building that afternoon. However, a teenaged boy in a hat and overcoat might have been observed leaving the second-floor ladies’ room with a briefcase.

An hour later Bill was still attempting to make sense of the vagaries of feline paternity when an elderly woman appeared in the outer office. She wore a black silk dress and pearls and she had posture that a general would envy. She took in her surroundings in one piercing glance. But when she saw Bill peering at her through the open door of his office, her demeanor changed to one of fluffy amiability. She smiled as she came in, motioning for him to sit back down.

“A. P. Hill?” she said eagerly.

“No, ma’am. She’s my partner, but she’s not here right now. And our secretary’s gone, too. I’m Bill MacPherson.”

The woman in black surveyed Bill’s shabby surroundings. Her sharp eyes flickered over the framed diploma and the secondhand furniture. They paused momentarily on the gaily appareled rodent leering at her from the corner.

“I think you’ll do fine,” she declared, settling happily into the captain’s chair Bill had purchased from Goodwill for the comfort of his clients. “I thought I’d drop by today because Lydia had to come downtown anyway to do her incessant courthouse research. I just know she drives them all crazy down there in the records office. Tracing her family tree, you know. She can’t quite prove a connection between her people and Robert E. Lee, so now she’s trying to find out the maternal grandmother of the man he bought Traveller from!”

Bill blinked, trying to find his way into the conversation.

“That’s why we thought it would be such fun to have A. P. Hill as an attorney. She might know something about the general’s family connections that the Danville Courthouse doesn’t have a record of.” She stopped herself, as if she had just realized that the young man might see this preference as a personal slight. “But of course our legal business has nothing to do with the war at all,” she hastened to explain. “It’s just a simple little old transaction. I bet you could do it standing on your head.”

Bill pictured Mr. Trowbridge bursting in and shouting, “Is it legal for an attorney to plead a case while standing on his head?” He smiled and ventured a question of his own. “Were we expecting you this afternoon, ma’am?”

Her gray eyes widened in surprise. “Why, I hope so, young man! I took the trouble to write you.”

Bill began to shuffle through the papers on his desk when she leaned over and announced, “There! You have my picture right there on top of your desk calendar.” She pointed one white-gloved finger at the sepia portrait of the Edwardian beauty.

Bill stared from one to the other. “You… I mean to say… Is that-”

She nodded with a satisfied little smile. “Oh, yes! It’s me all right. A good many years ago, before I married Mr. Dabney, rest his soul. My name is Flora.”

“But why did you send me this picture?”

Flora Dabney took a deep breath. “Well, young man, I’ll tell you. I get rather tired of being dismissed as just an old lady, so I thought I’d make a proper first impression on you. Just so you’d know who I really am, underneath this sixty years of erosion.”

Bill smiled. “I wish I’d known you then.”

The old lady’s eyes twinkled. “I expect I’d have led you a pretty dance, Mr. MacPherson. Now let us get to the matter at hand. My friends and I would like you to sell our house. It’s a lovely old colonial with Corinthian columns, ten bedrooms, fireplaces-”

“Mrs. Dabney! Whoa! Wait! Stop. I’m really sorry, ma’am. You’re a little confused. You see, I’m a lawyer, not a real estate agent. But if you’d like me to find you one…” He reached for the telephone book.

“We don’t want a Realtor,” she said, motioning for him to put the book away. “We need a lawyer. You see, there are only eight of us left and the house is just too big. The upkeep is very expensive, so we thought we’d see about selling it.”

“Eight of you own a house?” Bill’s mind was reeling at the legal intricacies of such a transaction.

“It amounts to that,” said Flora Dabney. “There is a deed of something or other, leaving the house to the widows and daughters of Confederate veterans.”

“A deed of trust? A deed of covenant?”

“Yes,” said Flora Dabney, as if the two were interchangeable, which they certainly were in Bill’s mind, because he could not remember the details of that particular law class.

“You want to sell the Home for Confederate Widows?” asked Bill.

“Women,” Flora Dabney corrected him. “There are only eight of us widows and daughters left.”

Bill did a rapid mental calculation. The Civil War had ended one hundred and twenty-something years ago. Surely the supply of widows and daughters must have run out. “How could there still be eight of you left after all these years?”

“We are the daughters of men who fought in the War as boys and who married quite late in life. My father was fourteen when he ran off to join the Confederacy. My mother was his third wife, whom he married in 1920, when he was seventy and she was twenty-three. My memories of him are quite dim by now, of course. The only actual widow is-”

“And the eight of you want to sell the home? Can you do that?”

“Yes. The deed says we can. You see, the house was bequeathed to the female dependents of Confederate veterans by a Colonel Phillips. He was a Confederate colonel, you see, and the house used to be his. It dates from before the War.”

Bill didn’t bother to ask Miss Dabney which war. As far as she was concerned, there hadn’t been another one. So the house was about a hundred and fifty years old. He’d have to go and take a look at it.

“Colonel Phillips was a generous man,” Flora was saying. “But he was nobody’s fool. Of course when he was drawing up the terms of the gift, he realized that sooner or later there would be no more dependents to benefit from his bequest. So it says-after a lot of wherefores and suchlike lawyerly talk-that when the trustees of the house feel that it is no longer needed, they may dispose of the property as they see fit. And, young man, the trustees of the house are the residents themselves!”

“And you want to sell it?”

“Yes. As I said, the upkeep is high, and there is far too much space for us. Not to mention the stairs. We talked it over and decided that we’d like to go to a nice retirement home just outside of town, so we’d like to arrange for a private sale of the property.”

“Doesn’t the foundation-or whatever it is-have an attorney already?”

Flora Dabney sighed prettily. “He passed away, poor thing. And he was only seventy.”

“Surely a Realtor-”

“No. We talked about that. Because the house is quite old and valuable, we decided that we could get a better price for it if we did not try to sell it locally.” She beamed at their collective cleverness. “So we thought we could have you run an ad in one of those papers up North. The New York Times, perhaps. And we’d see if we could get some wealthy Northerner to purchase it because it wouldn’t seem so expensive to him, house prices being what they are up there.”

“You want to sell the Home to a Yankee?” gasped Bill.

Flora Dabney favored him with a pitying smile. “Mr. MacPherson,” she said gently, “the War is over.”

Unfortunately at the home of Bill’s parents, the war was far from over. Bill spent the rest of an uneventful afternoon after Flora Dabney’s departure listening to the sound of a phone not ringing-and dreading his evening dinner engagement: one final meal with Mother and Dad at the old homeplace, after which he would stay the night in order to help Dad move out in the morning.

Without his legal assistance, Bill’s parents had come to the decision that Margaret MacPherson would keep the house. Doug MacPherson would move to an apartment within close commuting distance of his office. He was going to take some of the family furniture with him, but there was still some debate between them as to what would go and what would stay. Bill kept asking who was getting custody of his baby pictures and his Little League trophies, but his parents seemed unconcerned with these major issues, preferring to squabble over record albums and cookware. Really, he thought, there was no accounting for some people’s sense of values. They weren’t being exactly forthcoming about the cause of the breakup, either, and he hardly liked to press the matter, because he found it all hideously embarrassing. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. For legal purposes they were attributing the estrangement to irreconcilable differences, which is legalspeak for “none of your business.” He knew one thing, though-it wasn’t a friendly divorce, if, indeed, such a thing exists.

As Bill drove the sunny country road from Danville to the MacPherson home in Franklin County, he was hounded by a succession of infelicitous images of the evening to come. Pork Chop Hill: he is caught between his parents in a ruthless food fight. Medea: Mother decides that poison is much tidier than legal proceedings and spikes the pot roast with strychnine; they all die together. Get the Guest: they hold an inquest on their marriage and decide that their incompatibility is all his fault; his grades and his table manners are mentioned.

Bill groaned aloud. This was not how he imagined his first months of law practice. Attorneys were supposed to have seamy and depressing legal cases while their private lives were happy and carefree. But with him-just the reverse! He had a cheery little practice answering Jeopardy questions and helping little old ladies while his private life was shot to hell.

He should have asked A. P. Hill to take his parents’ case. Okay, he should have begged harder. But when they first agreed to go into practice together, Powell had declared that she would rather starve than take divorce cases, and Bill had agreed that he’d handle those should the occasion arise. So there he was, stuck with the family civil war, while Powell enjoyed herself at the courthouse, hobnobbing with car thieves and burglars, leaving him to do the dirty work.

When he noticed that the landmarks were becoming familiar, he came out of his reverie with a heavy heart. Only a few miles left to go before he entered the war zone. Over the bridge, up the hill past the Hudson’s Christmas tree farm, and then he’d see the stone pillars that led into Chancellorsville Estates. His parents’ colonial brick home was on Mead Lane, a winding blacktop that spiraled up the wooded ridge studded with large homes, all carefully different and even more carefully landscaped to blend into the hillside. Bill wished he could blend into the hillside. Odd how relationships are embarrassing in any generation but one’s own. He was too uncomfortable to contemplate this bit of philosophy, however. Tonight was still going to last about eight months, as far as Bill was concerned. He pulled into the concrete driveway, resisting the temptation to hit a nearby tree, just for the sake of a diversion.

Bill’s father came strolling out of the garage, wearing a pained smile that he usually reserved for bad puns and funerals. (Good God! She hadn’t locked him out, had she?) Other than that, he looked all right. He seemed a little scruffy in his old blue cardigan and paint-stained khakis, but he didn’t look haggard or distraught or anything else that would have sent Bill screaming into the shrubbery.

Bill hauled himself out of the car, feeling like a leper who has found work as a bill collector. “Hullo, Dad,” he mumbled, fiddling with his car keys. “How’s it going?”

“I can’t complain, son.” The pained smile reappeared. “It might be expensive.”

Bill winced. “Couldn’t we call a truce for the evening?”

Doug MacPherson sighed wearily. “I didn’t start this, Bill. You’d better clear your ceasefire with her.” He nodded toward the silent house. “She’s probably watching us from behind the living room curtains, so be careful what you do. Don’t laugh or anything, or she’ll be after you, too.”

“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on,” Bill muttered. “From Mother I get sound bites. I’ve heard politicians who were more forthcoming.”

“Don’t expect me to make sense of it. Your mother says that now that you kids are grown, she wants to find herself. Says she’s not being fulfilled. Wants to live her own life. Whose life has she been living up to now? I asked her. That didn’t sit well, either.”

“Can’t she find herself without getting a divorce?” asked Bill. He felt a guilty twinge, knowing that he was discussing his client with the opposing side, but he ignored his lawyerly conscience, telling himself that the parental relationship superseded the legal one. “Can’t she just take a course in oil painting at the community college?”

“Apparently not. I suggested something of the sort and she shied one of her tole-painted candlesticks in my direction.”

“I’ll have a word with her,” Bill promised. “I still seem to be in her good graces.”

Bill picked up his overnight case and walked toward the front door. As he reached for the doorknob, his mother appeared, eyes blazing. “Having a father-son chat, are we? It’s disgusting how you men stick together.”

Bill attempted a deprecating laugh. “Oh, no, we were just saying hello, Mother.”

Margaret MacPherson’s expression did not change. “And did he tell you about his girlfriend?”

Bill MacPherson felt his appetite shrivel away to nothingness. This evening was going to last longer than the Seven Days’ Battle.

In a stately white-columned house on a country road near Danville, tea was being served. In a formal dining room gleaming with silver and well-polished mahogany, the residents of the Home for Confederate Women were listening to Flora Dabney, punctuating her remarks with the discreet clink of spoons on bone china cups. So intent were they upon her report that when Julia Hotchkiss reached for the last slice of date bread, no one contested it.

“I think we’ve found our lawyer, ladies,” Flora Dabney was saying. “I think he’ll do quite well by us.” She took a tentative sip of her tea, then added another dollop of milk.

“Has he agreed to sell the house?” asked Ellen Morrison. She seemed even more nervous than usual, and she almost whispered her question, as if she feared Union spies behind the velvet draperies.

Flora’s eyes twinkled. “Well, he was a bit reluctant at first, because the transaction sounded so complicated, what with eight owners and all-but I persuaded him that it was a simple transaction, and he has consented to take it on.”

“Oh, Flora! Are you sure this is wise?” Mary Lee Pendleton had an expression of such sweetness and serenity that she still looked beautiful at eighty-one. She loved to wear her fur coat to the shopping mall in hopes of being mistaken for Helen Hayes.

“I’m sure we haven’t any choice,” Flora Dabney replied. “And as to the wisdom of it, Lydia is supposed to have made sure that all goes well. Does anyone have an alternate suggestion?”

No one did. The others exchanged glances and worried frowns, but no one spoke up. Julia Hotchkiss slurped her tea in the silence, edging her wheelchair closer to the plate of oatmeal cookies when she thought that no one was looking.

“Right. Then I take it we’re all in favor of the transaction as it stands?”

“Did you tell him… everything?” asked Ellen, glancing nervously about her.

“No, of course I didn’t, dear. I simply told him that we wanted to sell our house as expediently as possible. That should be sufficient, I think. He was very sweet, and quite charmed to be helping a dithery old lady like myself.”

“And you’re sure about this lawyer?” asked Mary.

Flora Dabney smiled. “Oh, yes, dear! He’s perfect. An absolute nincompoop. More tea, anyone?”