A Third Outright

I HAVE always remained friends with my ex-husbands, though not, for reasons I fail to understand, with my lovers. It may be property: I am a believer that property is the basis for most every bond and antagonism. No matter how lovey-dovey the marriage or how splodiferous the divorce, spouses joined or cleaved are forced to face each other across the mahogany to deal with property. Lovers are entirely different. They stagger about, under the power of some mystical feeling. No one knows how it begets or leaves; but, when it’s gone, one has only a charley horse of the heart and at best a string of pearls. Pearls, my mother told me, dissolve in vinegar; but real estate has metes and bounds and what downtown they call bankability.

Anyway my very first husband has remained in the sleepy law firm in the sleepy town where I left him. When I needed help with my mother’s surprising last wishes, I naturally called Hawthorne.

Who better to divine the soundness of my mother’s mind, what dark motives drove her, what gossip she was listening to? For one thing the senior partner in that firm, Judge Osgood, drew up the will. And Hawthorne knew me better than most. We had played with each other as children; we had gone to the university together, though I must say he ran, or rather shuffled, with a different set. We had married in that pre-pill world when hormones drove couples from the backseat of the Buick to the altar; it was all we could do to stay dressed until the bouquet was thrown. Such frenzy did not often affect Hawthorne and me. I remember sending him a card one Valentine’s Day, when we were just engaged, that reddened his face for a month: “More stimulation, less simulation,” I’d written, to the glee of the entire Kappa house.

And now, as I came back to that lovely, eternal, piteous town, it was Hawthorne’s earnest and clean-shaven face that greeted me.

“Margaret Merriweather,” he said, taking both my hands and looking steadily into my eyes, “you are unchanged and lovely as ever. I shall never forget how lovely you are.”

“Thank you, Hawthorne,” I replied in my best southern manner and offered my cheek to his. “You are a dear to go to all this trouble for me.”

“It is a privilege. After all our firm has served your family for three generations.”

“Indeed,” I said, hoping to raise a wee bit of hell, “at times the service has been quite personal.”

If Hawthorne’s taste for flirtation had developed in the decade since I’d last seen him, he gave no hint. He simply steered me by an elbow down the hall. I noticed from the doorplates that he had moved up since we were married, and that he now had a two-windowed partner’s office next to the Judge’s corner.

No small matter, that. The Judge’s office looks down upon the town’s main intersection and across to the Greek Revival bank that is its anchor. The architecture of the bank resembles that of the Judge himself: both meant to convey probity, deliberation, security. Harold Osgood still wore a full white moustache that you knew a barber trimmed weekly, still combed his longish white hair back off his face, still dressed as if he were planning to be sketched for a statue to go up in the town square. His office furniture was that of a small dining room in one of Atlanta’s better homes—Sheraton, doubtless the real thing, a table that served for conferences in the center of the green-carpeted room, and over by the wall, hidden so it might be where the Judge tied bass flies for his leisure, a scrolled roll-top desk, chockablock with papers and pleadings. The setting, and especially the gracefully turned chairs (I do like Sheraton), made one feel that the Judge was here to preside over a family gathering—that the only utensils one needed at this table were fellowship and consideration...