The Last Ballad(62)
“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.
Richard’s first meeting with Mr. Lytle had not come until March, when the Lytles had hosted their own engagement party for Paul and Claire at their home just east of Wilmington, on a wild expanse of land that rested between the city and a thin slip of barrier islands. It had not been a working plantation for more than sixty years, but it was immediately apparent to Richard that the Lytles’ lives were defined by an all-consuming desire to resurrect and reanimate the past.
The Lytles’ party had been a grand affair comparable only to the many other grand affairs that Richard quickly learned were the hallmark of the family’s wealth and prominence. Although the Lytles had made their fortune in rice on the coast and tobacco farther inland, the current generation now staked the family name on their social standing and willingness to express it. What seemed like hundreds of guests attended the party and floated in droves from one high-ceilinged room to another. In the crush of men in tuxedos and Confederate gray and women in sequined gowns and antebellum dresses, Richard quickly lost track of names and associations. Claire had already slipped away from them and disappeared into the crowd with Paul and the other young people, and Richard clung to Katherine’s hand while she navigated the crowd just as effortlessly as she seemed to navigate everything else in her life.