The Woman Who Fell From Grace (3 page)

I worked the Nova out of the airport and through the outskirts of Charlottesville, seat of Albemarle County, lush Eden where Jefferson built Monticello and Monroe built Ash Lawn, and where the haves still breed horses and cattle and themselves in plush country comfort.

Spring came earlier here. The cherry trees were already blossoming a gaudy pink. The tulips and daffodils were open, the grass was thick and green, and the forsythia bushes were explosions of mustard yellow.

I picked up Route 64 outside of town and coaxed the Nova up to eighty, where it handled smooth as a Maytag in the spin cycle. The highway climbed through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then it tumbled down and before me spread the valley with its gently undulating patchwork quilt of fertile green farmland and red clay soil, its tree-shaded brick manor homes, its calm. Clumps of cattle munched away on the grass and the Alleghenies rippled endlessly across the sky. There may be prettier places on earth than the Shenandoah Valley, but I haven’t seen one.

I got off the highway at Staunton, the historic little town where they don’t pronounce the
u
and where two world-famous celebrities, Alma Glaze and Woodrow Wilson, were born. It’s a gem of a place — steep, hilly streets of turreted Victorian mansions shaded by magnolias and redbuds, a restored turn-of-the-century business district, and a pleasing absence of the Yushie influence. Nary a sign of the young urban shitheads in their spandex workout togs. No take-out stir-fry emporium called Wok ’n’ Roll. No singles Laundromat called
dirtysomething
. The tallest building in town was the Hotel Woodrow Wilson, and it was built in 1925. Eleven stories, not counting the neon sign on the roof.

It was just past five. Workers were streaming out of the office buildings and the Augusta County Courthouse for their cars. They were smiling and laughing. No scowls. No snarls. No one was riding on my tail. No one was blasting his horn. They must put something in the water.

The Glaze brothers’ directions took me through town on Beverley Street past the Dixie Theatre, the vast, fabled, old silent-picture palace where
Oh
,
Shenandoah
had its original worldwide premiere. Workmen were busy sprucing the place up. A newly restored 70mm print of the film classic was being screened there in a few weeks as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebration. It was going to be a major deal. Surviving cast and crew members were even going to be flown in. Not that very many biggies were still around. The three stars and Goldwyn and Wyler were long gone. So was most of the all-star supporting cast. Raymond Massey, who played Thomas Jefferson. David Niven, who was the smug British colonel, Edgerton. Ethel Barrymore, Donald Crisp, Walter Huston, Linda Darnell. About the only surviving cast member I could think of was Rex Ransom, who played James Madison. I was hoping Rex came. I wanted to meet him for reasons that had nothing to do with
Oh
,
Shenandoah
and everything to do with my childhood.

I turned onto a narrow country road outside of town that twisted its way back through poultry farms and fenced pasturage. Fields of winter rye were being plowed under for fertilizer. The air was redolent of loamy soil and cow pies. Some black Angus grazed alongside the road. Lulu barked gleefully at them, secure in the knowledge they couldn’t catch her as we sped past. Such invincibility did not, however, extend to her sinuses. Her hay fever was already making her sniffle. I’d have to give her a pill when we got there. I didn’t want her developing breathing problems again. She snores when she has them. I happen to know this because she likes to sleep on my head.

Occasionally, a blue sign assured me I was on the right road for Historic Shenandoah. After about ten miles, the road came to an end at a white paddock gate, which was closed, and another blue sign, a big one. I had arrived. Historic Shenandoah was open for guided public tours Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to three and all day Saturday. The public was not welcome at any other time, such as now. The closed gate and the six-foot brick wall topped with electrified barbed wire made that quite clear. So did the surveillance camera. There was a phone at the gate. I picked it up and got a recording that told me everything the sign told me, then told me that if I had any other business to please hold on. I held on. The stirring Muzak version of “Vangie, My Love,” from Max Steiner’s
Oh
,
Shenandoah
movie score, began tickling my ear.

Until there was a click and a woman’s voice: “Help ya?”

“Stewart Hoag. I’m here to see Mavis Glaze.”

“Y’all want to drive right on up past the gift shop to the main house. Somebody’ll be there to meet ya.”

The gate swung open. I drove through. It closed behind me automatically. Evenly spaced ash trees lined the drive on both sides as it snaked up through fenced pasturage for several hundred yards before it arrived at a parking lot. There were picnic tables here and rest rooms and a log-cabin gift shop, where the people who were willing to spend five dollars a head to see the house where
Oh
,
Shenandoah
was filmed could spend even more on
Oh
,
Shenandoah
picture postcards, pens, pins, plates, peacock feathers, place mats, paintings, and posters, on
Oh
,
Shenandoah
cuff links, candlesticks, cookie molds, and cookbooks, on the many different renditions of “Vangie, My Love,” which had been recorded through the years by everyone from Bing to Burl to Billy. Idol, that is. The parking lot was empty now, the gift shop closed. A pair of black custodians were sweeping up. They didn’t look up at me as I drove past. The drive worked its way through some dense forest now, climbing as it did. Then the trees opened out in a huge semicircular forecourt of crushed stone, and there it was before me, up on a terraced rise so it could look down on the valley. Shenandoah was a mid-Georgian mansion of red brick built in the 1750s in the Palladian style. In fact it was considered the finest Palladian mansion of the British Colonies still intact. The main house was two stories high with a two-tiered portico and a mansard roof. Smaller, matching two-story dependencies flanked it in the forecourt and were connected to it by covered arcades. Broad stone steps led up to the front door, the one where a sobbing Vangie embraced De Cheverier after his bloody triumph over Edgerton. A short, massively built woman in her sixties stood there waiting for me in a pastel-yellow pantsuit that wouldn’t have looked good on Elle Macpherson. On her the effect was that of a banana that had two Bosc pears stuffed inside it. She had curly white hair and Popeye forearms and so many jowls her chin seemed to be melting into her neck. She came down the steps to greet me, her skin flushed with perspiration. She was squinting at me.

“Welcome to Shenandoah, Mistuh Hoag,” she said, her voice surprisingly high-pitched. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Fern O’Baugh, the housekeeper, cook, whatever.”

We shook hands. She nearly broke mine. A lot of her may have been fat, but her forearms weren’t.

“Make it Hoagy.”

“As in Carmichael?”

“As in the cheese steak. The one they don’t do in Buffalo.”

She squinted up at me curiously. Then a big jolly laugh erupted from her and she began to shake all over. “My, my,” she gasped. “I do love a man with a sense of humor. Y’know, I’ve read about you many times, Hoagy, in
People
magazine. All about your stormy marriage to Miss Merilee Nash, the woman who has everything except love.”

“More fiction than fact, I assure you.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said brightly. “Because, honey, you come across in print like a real beanbag.”

“Fern, I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

She erupted into another laugh. Then she took two steps toward my suitcases, tumbled right over Lulu, and sprawled heavily to the ground with an “Oof.” I gave her my hand to help her up. My knees buckled but somehow held.

“My, my, I’m sorry, darlin’,” she said, squinting down at Lulu. “I’m blind as Mistuh Magoo without my glasses. Should be wearing ’em, but they’re such a bother.” They were on a chain around her neck. She put them on and peered down at Lulu, who peered back up at her. “I do declare,” Fern cried, astonished. “You’re a little puppy dog! I thought you just had to be a big ol’ puddy cat. Sure do smell like one.”

“She has rather strange eating habits.”

“But what’s that there blue pancake she’s got on her head?”

Lulu snuffled, insulted.

“A present from her mommy,” I explained.

“Now, Hoagy, I must have your word she’ll stay off the north lawn. She riles the peacocks and Mavis’ll shoot her and me both.”

“Not to worry.”

“Good.” Fern snatched up my suitcases as if they were empty and started up the steps with them. She was quite light on her feet for someone so round. “Too bad you didn’t get an earlier flight,” she said to me over her shoulder. “You just missed her.”

I stopped. “What do you mean I missed her? We have an appointment. That’s why I’m here.”

“I know, but she flew up to Chicago to appear on the Miss Oprah Winfrey television show. Special program on the death of politeness in the modern American family. Last-minute thing. Mave felt sure you’d understand.”

“Oh, I do,” I said stiffly. “And when will she be back?”

“Sometime after midnight. Give you time to get settled. Now don’t you go getting heated up about Mavis. She’s the duchess. Anybody wants to get along with her learns that right off, or gets chewed up and spit out. That’s the way it is.” She glanced at me uneasily from the doorway. “Now I can just
tell
what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘That’s the way it
was
, ma’am.’ You’re thinking, ‘She hasn’t met
me
yet.’ ”

“My thoughts don’t tend to be that hard-boiled, generally. Runny is more like it.”

“Well, you just stick that business in your back pocket and sit on it. No offense, but you don’t look nearly tough enough to me. In fact, you don’t look tough at all.” She checked me over. “Got a nice tall frame on you, but they ain’t been feeding you enough up there in New York. How you stay so skinny?”

“Good breeding.”

“I’ll have to start putting some meat on your bones. I can do French tonight, Italian, you name it.”

“Southern will more than do.”

“Fine. I’ll fry us up a few chickens. It’s just you and me. Richard went with Mave, and Mercy has a late class. You allergic to anything I should know about?”

“Only assholes.”

She grinned up at me. “We
are
gonna get on fine.”

We went inside.

The broad entrance salon extended straight through the center of the old house to the glass doors at the back, which were thrown open to let in the late-afternoon breeze. The north lawn out back was being cut by a gardener on a tractor mower. The aroma of fresh-cut spring grass spiced with wild chives wafted in the doors, finer than any perfume. The salon was paneled in tulip poplar with crown molded-wood cornices. The floor was irregular, wide oak boards. A narrow staircase with a walnut railing led up to the second floor. The furnishings were spare — a tall clock, a Chippendale table, a deacon’s bench. Glaze-family oil portraits hung from the walls along with old maps and documents. One was the original royal land patent from the 1700s.

Two pedimented doorways on either side of the entrance salon opened into the four downstairs rooms. Fern led me through them. They were large, airy rooms with twelve-foot ceilings and tall windows overlooking the gardens. The walls were painted eggshell white throughout, with raised plaster molding and colonial-blue chair rails, except for in the library, which was paneled like the entrance salon. All four rooms had stone fireplaces. Again, the furnishing was spare, and Chippendale. The two front rooms were parlors, one formal, the other a sitting room. The sitting room was where John Raymond proposed to Vangie in the movie. The two rear rooms were the dining room and the famous library, where Alma Glaze wrote
Oh
,
Shenandoah
in longhand seated before the windows at a small writing table. There was a velvet rope in front of the table to keep visitors from touching it and the writing implements arrayed upon it. Her original manuscript lay there in a glass case in the middle of the room. Aside from this, and the obvious presence of electricity, the downstairs was just as it had been more than two hundred years before.

“The main house is only used for formal occasions nowadays,” Fern declared. “Mostly, it’s here for the tourists. They see the downstairs, the master bedroom upstairs, and Miss Alma’s own room from her girlhood, which they used for Vangie’s in the movie. The rest of the upstairs is still in need of historical restoration. The Glaze family was still living up there until the 1920s, when they remodeled the east wing and moved out there. That’s where they live now. Keep their privacy that way. We lead visitors from here over to the old kitchen wing, and then the historic service yard and then on out. C’mon,” she commanded, smacking me in the shoulder with the back of her hand. “I’ll give ya the quick tour.”

Lulu and I followed her through a narrow door off the dining room and down a short wooden stairway to a damp, cellar passageway.

“They’d bring the food from the kitchen along here to the table,” she explained, puffing as we made our way down the long, dark corridor, passing the wine cellar and then the root cellar. “Quite a trek, but they always had the kitchens a distance away from the main house in the old days, on account of the heat and danger of fire.”

The sunken corridor eventually came up outside the old kitchen. A low railing kept people from going inside. The kitchen ceiling was very low and soot-blackened. There was a vast open hearth with a baking oven and a cast-iron crane with heavy cast-iron pots hanging from it. A pine table sat in the middle of the room heaped with antique kitchen implements. Dried herbs hung from pegs. The floor was dirt.

“Whole lot of sweaty, hard work,” observed Fern. “But believe me, the food come outta here tasted a sight better than what you get outta one of those microwaves. The cooks slept upstairs. Kitchen fire heated the whole place.” She smacked my shoulder again. “C’mon.”