Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

in the quarters would gladly drink to the new mistress’s health.”

Harlan’s face turns shrewd. “You see how they manipulate me?” he says to Addie. “All right then, damn it, Jarry, all. But I don’t want them drunk. I want them in the fields tomorrow like any other day.”

“I understand.”

“You understand, what?”

Jarry doesn’t answer.

“That’s right. God forbid that you abase yourself to call me ‘sir’ or ‘master,’ which is what I am.”

The steward’s expression is neutral, his eyes direct, unflinching, like a pair of taps turned to their full flow. Meeting it, Harlan’s narrow and their look of good cheer crisps like paper in a flame. They hate each other! Addie thinks, and she’s grateful when a bird, fallen in the grass nearby, gives a weak thrash and breaks the spell.

“Oh, look,” she says. “Poor thing. It’s still alive.”

Jarry picks it up.

It is some kind of parrot, bright green with a yellow head and a reddish-orange domino across the eyes. Its breast moves in rapid, frantic respiration and then stops. The eye grows fixed and clouds, and Addie becomes aware of Jarry’s hand—large, long-fingered, and narrow, like a certain kind of trowel, the sort a gardener or arborist might use for some exacting work. Cupped the way it is, holding the dead bird, it strikes Addie as refined and gentle.

“How beautiful,” she says.

“These? No, dear, they’re vermin,” Harlan contradicts her lightly. “But, come, you must greet our guests and have a glass of punch.” Harlan takes her arm, but she holds briefly back.

“What is it?” She seeks Jarry’s eyes now for the first time in the exchange, and he, for the first time, looks back, with that expression that is like a question that, once posed, you cannot rest until you have the answer to.

“A Carolina parakeet.”

SIX

Really? I had no idea there were parakeets in South Carolina.”

Claire leaned toward the engraving for a better look. Featuring a little green and yellow bird posed in a cocklebur bush in six or seven dramatic, if implausible, positions, Conuropsis carolinensis, “The Carolina Paroquet,” was part of a small exhibit of Audubons hung in the wood-paneled foyer of Harlow’s dining hall, where she was killing time, waiting for the faculty breakfast to begin.

“Well, there aren’t. Not anymore.”

After her first glance, Claire had to struggle to avert her eyes from her interlocutor’s amazing helmet of black hair. It was like a toupee so bad it could only be real, she decided. He might have been the George in a quartet of aging Beatles impersonators.

“They failed to endear themselves to the rice-planting interests,” he continued, “and endeared themselves a little too well to makers of ladies’ hats. The last one was taken in the wild in 1904, I believe it was. I’m Ben Jessup, by the way, college librarian.”

“Claire DeLay.”

“I know who you are.” He smiled and shook the hand she offered. “We met in Umbria almost twenty years ago. My uncle was a judge at Casa Grande the year you competed.”

“You’re kidding. Who’s your uncle?”

“Glenn Gould?”

“Glenn Gould was your uncle?” Her hand wandered to the O-ring on the breast of her suit, a peach-colored Vertigo she’d exhumed from dry cleaner’s plastic in the closet, where it had hung for fifteen years. After considerable agony, she’d put it on, having nothing better, and the truth was, it still looked pretty smart and she looked good in it, even if the big chrome motorcycle-jacket-style zipper was a bit too 1989. “Glenn Gould was the reason I became a pianist in the first place,” she said. “I grew up listening to the Goldberg Variations. I must have listened to that record a million times.”

“A million—really?”

“No, you’re right—two million is probably closer to it!”

Jessup laughed. “And do you prefer the ’55 or ’81?”

“Are you kidding—the ’55! Glenn Gould was a god to me!”

“He liked your playing, too.”

“He didn’t! He did not! Did he?”

“Especially the slow movement. You did Brahms’s second, if I recall.”

“Not the third movement?” Claire said. “I was all over the map on the third movement!”

“Well, he was moved by it.”

“Excuse me while I go outside and shoot myself!”

“Please don’t!” Jessup said, still laughing. “Why would you? I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I am! I am pleased!”

Still smiling, he narrowed his eyes, and how could Claire explain what it meant to her that Glenn Gould had listened to her play the andante of the second twenty years before in a competition she had lost and been moved by it? She couldn’t, so instead, she resorted to the stratagem that twenty years of living with a strong, self-centered man had taught her to perfect. “So, tell me about you.”

“I’m a librarian—I think I mentioned that.” Ben made a funny little moue, and at this evidence of wit, Claire laughed, deciding she liked him. “I can claim credit for this exhibit, though.” His nod returned her to the wall. “Next to Conuropsis is Say’s least shrew, from the Viviparous Quadrupeds. Not one of Audubon’s more attractive renderings, to be perfectly frank. All these prints came to us from the Harlow family, who also bequeathed us Samuel Hilliard’s diary, which I expect you know….” His eyebrows—which bore a familial resemblance to his hair—formed an interrogatory arch.

“I don’t think I do,” Claire said. “Should I?”

“It contains a reference to the disappearance at your house.”

She blinked. “Disappearance? At my house? Wando Passo?”

“You don’t know the story?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“Good morning, Deanna,” he said. “Join us. Claire, you know Deanna Holmes, don’t you? Deanna, Claire DeLay.”

“We’ve met,” said the assistant dean, a woman in heavy-framed designer glasses, mahogany-toned lipstick, and basic black, like Ben.

“Deanna was on my interview committee,” Claire said, beginning to doubt the wisdom of her suit, which seemed altogether too much like a drink with an umbrella in a cored-out pineapple on a black lacquer tray of dry martinis, up. “She had to tell me what a vita was. How embarrassing was that!”

“Yes,” Deanna agreed, “but here you are. How does it feel?”

“To