One of Joe’s rules: The first thing you do in a new city is take the public transportation. He and Eleanor chugged along St. Charles in the overstuffed streetcar. From afar, the live oaks seemed to drip with Spanish moss, but up close, they were just Mardi Gras beads, months old, stuck there.
Eleanor and Joe hopped off at Third Street and crossed. The Fanning estate was on the good side of the avenue, the river side.
2658 Coliseum stretched the entire block, its iron fence skillfully wrought into stalks of sugarcane. A plaque told the history, but it was too dark out to read.
The mansion glowed from within. Eleanor balked at the gate.
The disbelief had been hitting her in waves since she’d gotten the news that Bucky had proposed to Ivy on the plane to New Orleans. (“All I require is that you love oysters,” he’d told her. “But I don’t love oysters.” “You will.”) Eleanor had shown up at work that Monday, her in-basket still rich with twenties. Nobody had the heart to claim them. The joke wasn’t funny anymore.
Lester had marched manfully into Eleanor’s office. “There’s a good chance it won’t work out—”
“I’m happy for them,” Eleanor said and returned to her work. “Could you close the door?”
The mansion door swung open courtesy of a courtly black man in tails with white hair and white gloves. He was Mister, the husband of Taffy. Both uniformed servants to two generations of Fannings, and hopefully a third, now that Bucky had returned from New York with, of all things, a bride.
Eleanor and Joe entered. The living room was a-swish with ball gowns and tails. Just as an “Oh!” was about to escape Eleanor’s mouth—she’d worn flats and a knee-length dress she’d had no time to iron—a mint julep was thrust into her palm. The shock of the frosty silver tumbler slapped Eleanor’s face into a smile.
“Eleanor! Joe!” It was Ivy, wearing a pleated chiffon gown, lime with orange flowers and sleeves that hung like calla lilies. She gave it a twirl. “1972 Lilly Pulitzer! It belonged to Bucky’s mother. Did you know that if you admire something, the person has to give it to you? That’s the Southern way.”
Ivy took Eleanor’s hand and introduced her around. Ivy’s frailty was still there, but without the undercurrent of unpredictability. No, being adored by Bucky—and she was adored, no question, the way his soft gaze infused her with ease, the delight they took in each other’s words, the way his forearm fit the curve of her waist—had softened Ivy’s edges. One might say she’d grown into her frailty. The South was a good place for that.
Politicians and oil barons, lawyers and historians, shipping titans and ne’er-do-wells: to a person, they loved Ivy, had fully embraced her and, by association, Eleanor and Joe. Eleanor had never before felt so fascinating. In turn, those she spoke with became fascinating, and so the bonhomie spiraled up, up, up. The air felt cozy with kindness and laughter, not like New York, where people you talked to perpetually scanned the room for someone better. A week earlier, at a Fox network party, a Simpsons writer had literally pushed Eleanor aside midsentence when James L. Brooks walked in behind her. Manners, Eleanor grasped through the haze of mint juleps, weren’t a function of hollow snobbery and misguided airs; they were acts of profound generosity.
Granny Charbonneau sat sternly in the corner, both hands firmly gripping the long handle of her cane. At one point she flapped her hand at Eleanor.
“Are you the sister?” Granny Charbonneau barked. “Maybe you can convince Bucky to stop dressing like a hangman.”
At the food table, Eleanor couldn’t get enough of the hot spinach dip. Taffy leaned in and shared the secret ingredient: “Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom.”
Bucky’s mother led Joe over. “This one I just want to slip in my pocket.” Earlier in the day, she’d cut her forearm sharpening the blade of the push mower. “Mister hurt his back, and what’s the alternative, to hire a team of gardeners? I can cut my own lawn.”
Later, Eleanor found herself alone. She dropped into a fussy love seat. The pillows hit her low back in just the right spot. Mary Marge leaped onto her lap and curled up.
“Hello, you,” Eleanor said to the pooch, startled by how thick-tongued it came out. She was unaccustomed to the relentless salvos of alcohol.
Chunky leather scrapbooks lined the coffee table, their sumptuous padded covers begging to be opened. Eleanor obliged. On the first page was a truly weird photo.
The Royal Court of Khaos.
Grown men and women in outlandish costumes, their faces morbidly serious, more waxen than human. Bucky, in a beaded gold satin shirt, gold shorts, white tights, rouged cheeks, a platinum-blond Prince Valiant (hair?) wig and a fountain of ostrich feathers springing from his gold headpiece, stood among the similarly lurid king, queen, pages, and maidens.
“Those parties start in a month.” It was Ivy, with Bucky. “I couldn’t be more nervous. Bucky’s making me take curtsying lessons so I don’t embarrass him before the court.”
“Ivy, my love,” Bucky said with mock exhaustion. “They’re not parties. They’re balls.”