screen, yet I glimpsed lighted candelabra when the formal dining room was used or heard music when the dinner party spilled out onto the terrace. I used to daydream about what life in the large brick house must be like.
Although I never wanted for anything growing up, Knotts do tend to keep their money in land. Stephensons, being town-bred, may spread themselves a little more lavishly-Aunt Zell married well, and her house in Dobbs is almost as large as the Vickery house in Cotton Grove-but no one in our immediate family ever aspired to the things the Vickerys aspired to. Mother and Aunt Zell might take some of us shopping in New York once a year, and yes, we always saw a comedy or musical while we were there; but the Vickerys had season tickets to the Met and seemed to think nothing of flying up during the middle of the week to hear a noted tenor or soprano.
My brothers played guitars and banjos by ear and those that wanted more education went to State or Carolina and were then expected to earn their own livings. The three Vickery offspring went to Smith, Vassar, or Yale, and all of them had trust funds to play around with. Which is probably why none of them felt the need to go into medicine or banking, the traditional professions in their family.
The two Vickery daughters lived on opposite sides of the continent. One was in the film industry, something to do with the production side of it, I believe; the other was currently married to an avant-garde composer in Toronto. But Michael had come out of the closet years ago and he still lived out at the Pot Shot.
It was unlikely that any of the senior Vickerys had paid much attention to the doings of the junior Whiteheads at the other end of their garden, but I wondered if Michael had?
“Let us pray,” said the preacher.
7 changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
I was in early on Monday morning and already into my second cup of coffee by the time Sherry and the clerks arrived at the office. They were willing to talk about their weekend if I was interested, but when I mumbled around my jelly doughnut that I hadn’t had a chance to read the newspapers since Friday, they left me to get on with them.
The biweekly Dobbs Ledger is owned by a family with unabashedly liberal leanings, and Linsey Thomas, its current editor and publisher, had come out for Luther Parker the week before, citing the need for more minorities on the bench. I suppose white women do hold a narrow margin over black men and Parker would have been my choice, too, if I weren’t running. But I was, and it hurt my feelings not to have my own hometown paper endorse me. On the other hand, Friday’s letters-to-the-editor columns had carried several letters written in my support and they’d positioned my ad-Deborah Knott for District Court Judge… isn’t it time?-very nicely, just above the fold on the obituary page.
People here usually turn to the deaths before the engagements and weddings, so that’s the most read page in the paper.
Doesn’t matter whether the deceased are stillborns or pushing a hundred. If somebody has a local connection, the Ledger will list parents (and sometimes both sets of grandparents) even if they’ve been dead fifty or sixty years, followed by the names of all immediate survivors, cause of death, and what the deceased did for a living. Each obituary concludes with the name of the funeral home, visiting hours, what church, who’s preaching the funeral, and where the body’s to be interred. No mistaking one Willie Johnson for another by the time the Ledger gets finished. My picture was small, but I thought it conveyed competence without grimness. I also hoped that the contrast to all those sober suits and short male haircuts in the other ads would add subliminal appeal, remind the electorate that they might need a judge with a woman’s tender heart sometime.
John Claude arrived at his regular time and acted surprised to find me there on the sunporch already leafing through the newspapers. Usually he’s the first one in after Sherry and, despite pro forma grumbling about Reid and me wandering in at all hours, he prefers it that way. Gives him a chance to drink his coffee in peace. Sherry knows better than to let the clerks disturb him. Not that he’d be rude to them-John Claude is seldom rude to anyone-but pained shadows do cross his thin patrician face; and while Sherry never notices my exasperated sighs, she’s alert to John Claude’s every nuance. Must be fun being a man in a Southern town.
The pained shadows fought with pleasantries as he saw the shambles I’d made of the paper. (Okay, so I notice nuances, too. But I’m older than Sherry. My generation was raised to notice. Doesn’t mean I still react with an automatic “I’m sorry” or “Let me take care of whatever’s bothering your little ol’ manly sense of rightness” the way she does.)
Monday morning’s big “local” story was yet another drug deal gone wrong over the weekend, this one down at Fort Bragg: shotguns, three dead, no arrests yet. The N amp;O’s editorial page carried endorsements for most of the major candidates. They did not reach down as far as outlying judgeships, and I’d already moved on to the sports section, where the owner of the Durham Bulls was still shaking his minor league monopoly over Raleigh ’s dreams of getting its own team.
“I’m finished with the front part, if you want it,” I said, cheerfully handing it over.
“Is that jam?” he fretted as he tried to restore the virgin alignment of each sheet only to be foiled by a sticky smear on the op ed page. A very small smear, I might add, and one I’d wiped away so carefully that any normal person would never have noticed.
“You mean to tell me Julia still hasn’t finished redoing y’all’s breakfast room?” I asked.
“Touche.” He looked contrite. “Forgive my shortness, Deborah. You’re quite right. I shouldn’t allow disorder at home to affect relations here.”
I groaned at the mild pun, and my cousin smiled with restored good humor. He saw the feature section of Friday’s Ledger still face up at the end of the table and said, “That’s a nice picture of you.”
Despite fulsome campaign ads on every other page, the paper had used its Focus page for a here’s-who’s- running look at all the local primary candidates: age, education background, work experience. There wasn’t enough room on the page for everyone’s picture, so only the candidates for district court judgeships, clerk of the court, and county commissioners got to have their shining faces published. For the first time it dawned on me that those were also the only three races with serious black candidates-Linsey Thomas’s subtle way of alerting blacks and liberals to the potentials for racial balance?
“I was right surprised to see Talbert’s letter,” John Claude said as he poured himself a cup of coffee and added a precise tablespoon of half-and-half from the refrigerator.
“What’s to be surprised about?” I asked, shifting all the papers over to make room for him at the end of the table. “G. Hooks writes a letter every year supporting Jesse.”
“Not G. Hook’s letter in yesterday’s News and Observer. I meant Gray Hook’s letter in Friday’s Ledger.”
“Oh, yeah. That sort of surprised me, too,” I admitted. “You reckon he and his daddy had another fight or something?”
Grayson Hooks Talbert-everyone called him G. Hooks-is one of the movers and shakers of the state’s Republican Party, a man so far to the right that he almost makes Jesse Helms look liberal. Chairman of the board and major stockholder of Talbert International, a pharmaceutical company of global proportions, he also sits on the boards of several major corporations that have profitable ties to government. Talberts always had money, but the Reagan-Bush years have been particularly good to G. Hooks, and his country estate on the Durham side of the Research Triangle now boasts its own private airstrip and two Lear jets.
All that jetting off to open new markets out on the Pacific rim was probably how a relatively moderate Republican had slipped into the lovely old Victorian governor’s mansion back here in North Carolina. Not that G. Hooks hadn’t contributed heavily to James Hardison’s election two years ago. It must have been like sucking lemons though, since the antediluvian Democrat who’d tried to pull an upset was probably closer to him philosophically than Governor Jim Hardison would ever be.
He had two sons: Gray-short for Grayson Hooks Talbert, Junior-and Victor. As near as I could tell, listening to gossip and reading between the fine lines of newsprint, the younger son had emerged from the womb with G. Hooks’s single-minded devotion to business. A dutiful ant who ran their New York office while shuttling back and forth to Capitol Hill, Victor Talbert had graduated with a Wharton MBA, married a Harvard Law whiz, and appeared quite happy to stay out of the South.
Gray, on the other hand, started off a happy-go-lucky grasshopper. Flunked out of Carolina, U VA, and the Citadel, smashed up two Porsches and a Jag before he was twenty. Without getting into a heavy nature/nurture
