Today Will Be Different(35)
“That’s just it,” Ivy said. “Taffy doesn’t need your help.”
“I’m sure she didn’t take it as an insult.”
“Bucky did and I did.”
Joe was awake now and shaking his head.
“Put Bucky on the phone,” Eleanor said, tears coming down in sheets. “I’ll apologize.”
“He doesn’t want to get on the phone.”
“I’ll apologize in person, at breakfast.”
Another weird pause. “It’s been a long night around here, waiting for the Times-Picayune to be delivered. Anyway, it’s the type of thing that should be done in writing. You can leave a letter with the concierge.”
Eleanor flew to the desk and clawed at the sliver of a drawer, wild for stationery. Joe had his running shoes on.
“It didn’t work for Neville Chamberlain,” he said. And then he headed out.
John Tyler, a Virginia legislator, was added to William Henry Harrison’s Whig ticket solely to deliver the Southern vote. When Harrison was sworn in on a freezing 1841 day, Tyler attended the inauguration. That evening, he returned to his plantation in Virginia, expecting few vice-presidential duties. A month later, a hand-delivered letter informed him that Harrison had died of pneumonia, making John Tyler the tenth president of the United States. Tyler, nicknamed “His Accidency,” governed without distinction. He chose not to run for reelection and, when his term was over, returned to the family plantation, Sherwood Forest. Because he accomplished so little in office, John Tyler is known in history books mainly for being the president who fathered the most children, fifteen. Because he was later elected to the Confederate congress, Tyler is also known for being the only president upon whose death the nation’s flag did not fly at half-mast.
Sherwood Forest is open to the public, although few tourists find reason to take the trip down Route 5, the John Tyler Highway, to the tidewater of Charles City County, Virginia. Astonishingly, John Tyler’s grandson is still alive and resides there with his wife. Sherwood Forest’s house, at three hundred feet, is the longest frame house in the country. It includes a seventy-foot-by-twelve-foot ballroom designed for the Virginia reel, Tyler’s favorite dance. Sherwood Forest’s sixteen hundred acres are dotted with former smokehouses, stables, and slave quarters. The twenty-five acres of terraced gardens include hundred-foot magnolias and maples as well as the first Gingko biloba tree planted in the United States, a gift to Tyler from Commodore Perry. Over the years, the Tyler family have received countless requests to rent Sherwood Forest for private parties. They’ve always declined.
Which was why, when Bucky Fanning phoned the Tylers with a request to get married at Sherwood Forest and was refused, once, twice, and three times, after which he got on a plane to Atlanta and drove the seven hours to Charles City County to make a personal appeal and the Tylers said yes, every toast at the rehearsal dinner mentioned this as quintessential Bucky.
“Either run with the big dogs or stay on the porch,” someone said.
Bucky. You really did have to love him.
Khaos’s party planner oversaw the June wedding. She spent the day itself welcoming a fleet of vans to Sherwood Forest carrying straight–from–New Orleans oysters, crawfish, milk rolls, and the full Jimmy Maxwell Orchestra. She was also tasked with navigating the delicate challenge of having a hundred and sixty-four guests on the groom’s side and two on the bride’s.
The afternoon of the nuptials, Ivy and Eleanor lolled in Richmond Inn robes, Joe having just returned from a day trip to Monticello. In two hours, the bridal shuttle would ferry them to Sherwood Forest.
Ivy, always the chameleon, spoke with a Southern lilt.
“I was lying in bed one morning. You know my favorite thing in creation is an after-breakfast nap…”
Ivy took center stage on the vast expanse of beige carpet. Her eyes danced with wicked amusement. Had she learned it from Eleanor, the ability to turn any event into a story?
“I swear to you, the wallpaper started moving. I got out of bed and put my hand on the spot and it was warm! I found a pucker in the seam and pulled. Underneath were mud tubes, like veins crawling up the wall. I screamed like the star of a teen horror movie. ‘Termites!’”
Ivy’s endless leg peeked through the high slit in her bathrobe, an effect so sexy it might have been staged; for Ivy, these alluring moments happened of themselves.
“Not a week later I went to mail a letter and the mailbox fell off its post. Right into the street! A group of tourists were standing around reading that old plaque and I just about died of embarrassment.”
Joe grabbed a video camera to capture this, Ivy at her best. There had been bad times but there were good ones too.
“The next day, the termites swarmed the carriage house, thousands of them in a cloud you couldn’t see through. That’s how they mate, in flight! Poor Taffy had to stand there with a vacuum sucking them out of the air. They got in her eyes and her ears and her nostrils! She was spitting them out of her mouth! You know what else? After termites mate, their wings drop off. So for the rest of the year, wings in my cereal, wings in my slippers. Once I squirted sunblock in my hand and there were wings in it! The craziest part? You mention termites to anyone in New Orleans and they’re in utter denial. ‘What termites?’ We had to call the Terminix guy because they’d gotten into the two-by-four things that hold up the roof. Bucky made him park around the corner. But when the neighbor came home and saw the Terminix truck in front of his house, he marched over, and he and Bucky had it out on the front lawn. Even after that, you mention termites and Bucky will say, ‘What termites?’”