MacPherson's Lament

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.”