“They,” she said. “The party. Claire and Paul. Our friends. Me. Everyone.” She stepped onto the porch and let the door close quietly behind her. She wore a beautiful gown of pale blue sequins that made him perfectly aware that on nights like this, Katherine appeared much younger than him and could easily pass for Claire’s older sister.
She looked toward the darkness over his shoulder and folded her arms across her chest as if she were cold, then she smiled again. She reached for him, and he let her take his hand.
“I was just telling Ingle’s girls about the Lytles’ run-in with the strikers down at Loray,” he said. He shivered ironically as if the story induced real fear.
“Richard!” Katherine said. She let go of his hand and pretended to swat at it as if scolding him. “The Lytles were simply curious, that’s all. They’re fine people.”
“Perhaps so, but no matter how fine they are, they’re still going back to Wilmington with a very skewed idea of life here in Gaston County.”
“Well,” Katherine said. She crossed her arms again. “I say, ‘Let them go, Richard.’”
“It just dawned on me that Claire must have mentioned the strikers in Washington. Paul’s father’s going to think this thing has made it all the way to the halls of Congress, which, apparently, it has.”
“Let them think what they will, Richard. I don’t understand why it bothers you.”
“It bothers me because our people do not behave that way, Kate, and the Lytles are going to paint mill people with a very broad brush, and it’s not fair. Keep in mind that we’re mill people too, but we’d never have a problem like this. We have good people. Satisfied people. Let the Bolshevists and communists and socialists come to McAdamville. They’ll all go back to New York disappointed.”
“Come back to the party, Richard,” she said. She moved toward him, stopped, came closer, and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. “Don’t worry about the Lytles, Richard, not tonight. Please.”
“I’ll be in in a moment, Kate. I promise. I’ll wait for Guyon for just a few more minutes, but I’ll be in.”
Katherine sighed. She turned and looked at the closed front door, perhaps thought of the party that was going on inside. She looked at Richard again.
“Did you talk with Ingle about Grace’s schooling?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I will. I promise.”
“She’s a fine girl, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he said. “She always has been.”
“They’ve just hit a rough patch.”
“I know,” he said. “We’ll help however we can.” But he wanted to say, Yes, we’ll help her, just like we help everyone else. Just like I’m about to help Lytle. Just like I’ve helped everyone who’s ever come to me.
“Okay,” she said. “She’s such a wonderful girl.” She looked toward the shadows on the far end of the porch. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
“To whom? Guyon?”
“No,” she said. She furrowed her brow, looked down at her hands, spun her wedding ring on her finger. “Tonight, to the guests. You’re the father of the bride-to-be, Richard. We talked about your saying something.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m ready.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked up at him, smiled. “Please come inside soon. We all miss you. I miss you.”
“I will,” he said. “I’ll be in in a moment. I promise.”
She turned, her gown sweeping across the porch in a small arc. She opened the door and he watched through the windows as she walked through the lobby and disappeared into the ballroom.
Aside from the conversation with Guyon, Richard was also plagued by the speech he was expected to give. Katherine had been urging him to prepare a few comments about Claire and Paul’s first meeting, their engagement, their new lives together. Richard had spent hours writing down and scratching out phrase after phrase, trite saying after trite saying. He’d arrived at the club that evening with nothing written down, only a head full of vague notions of things he wanted to say, emotions he wanted to convey, ideas he somehow wanted to condense into words.
But then this debacle with the Lytles on their trip over from the hotel. Now he was rattled and standing outside and smoking what he hoped would be his last cigarette before dinner, his mind turning over the things he could say in front of this audience that would make some kind of lasting impression on the Lytles. He wanted to give them something to think about while they traveled back to the coast, where oak trees and dew-damp magnolias awaited them at the great plantation they’d managed to cling to in the years following the War Between the States. He wanted them to part with a clear idea of who his family was, what his town was, what his role in all of it was.
He squinted his eyes as if doing so could allow him to look into his own brain for any words that might be floating past the screen of his mind.
“When one thinks of today’s youth,” he whispered to himself. “When one thinks of today’s youth, it is easy to consider what one sees before him on the streets of a city or hears on the radio or learns of through rumor and assumption. But we must not, we cannot, confuse those youth with our own, these great young men and women who have gathered here tonight to celebrate the greatest young man and the greatest young woman I have ever known. These are the youth that a great state like ours and a great city like ours give rise to.” But he stopped when he considered that Paul was not from Gastonia or Gaston County, and Richard certainly wasn’t willing to invoke the grandeur of Wilmington or New Hanover County on a night like this after what the Lytles had seen.
He closed his eyes more tightly and blotted out the screen in his mind, the white light that had been thrown upon it slowly burning into a hot rage against Lytle. He opened his mouth and began again.
“When I think of today’s youth, I do not think of what I see and hear. I’d be a fool to be so blind. No, I think of who and what I know, and I know the wonderful young men and women in this room tonight, so many of you from here in Gaston County, so many of you dear friends of Claire’s since her birth. And it’s such a pleasure for Claire’s future in-laws to have the chance to witness the best of what a city like ours has to offer.”
He was getting closer to what he wanted to say to the assembled crowd, what he wanted to say directly to George Lytle, a man whom Richard had seen only once before this evening. He’d met Paul a handful of times while he and Claire were courting. He’d found the young man shy, awkward, soft-spoken, and kind, somewhat provincial, but that was to be expected of any landed family from coastal North Carolina, where so much of the state’s power and former glory had once been seated.