“Desk clerk?” says the old man.

“Or am I having the pleasure of addressing the manager?” says Mr. Tolliver, setting down his rattan suitcase on our black-and-white hexagonal tiles.

“Manager!”

“My name is Tolliver, sir, and I am interested in accommodations for myself and Mrs. Tolliver for a few weeks—”

“Accommodations!” cries the old man, grabbing the banister rail to save himself from falling over, and Tolliver said, “This is the Hotel Fair, is it not?” (basing it all on his reading of Lucinda, who—while turning our foibles into gold—likes to play with words, as writing people do, and had contrived “Hotel Fair” from our original American name).

Uncle Brownell accumulated enough breath to say it was not a “hotel” of any sort, it was a private residence and there hadn’t been an empty room in it since the First World War, and Mr. Tolliver digressed for a moment to say with an ingratiating smile, “Excuse me, sir, but aren’t I speaking to Bubberdarlin?” breaking into Uncle Brownell’s “Now just a minute, if you please!” to say he was getting a crick in his neck from the stairwell and would Bubberdarlin come down or should he come up? All of it ending with some advisory whispering by Mrs. Tolliver, who seemed more sensitive than Mister at picking up the early-warning signals of trouble coming in from above, Tolliver accepting the turn in their affairs and asking Uncle Brownell for directions to the Social Security office, Uncle Brownell pleased at being able to end the visit with, He had never heard of such a place.

But everybody else knows where the SS office is and when he shouted the question at Bivins, who had revved up the Chevy and was giving the engine a series of seductive roars, Bivins shouted back that it wasn’t far, “just beyond the Beneficial Mortgage & Firearms Company” (as if that would place it for the usual transient), adding on second thought that he would drop them off there if that was where they wanted to go, quieting the motor to give center-stage to flashing the headlights and several authoritative squawks of the horn, Tolliver explaining that he was running low on cash, that the New York “restaurant and theater prices make your hair stand on end” (a manner of speaking, with his Caribbean cut) and he needed to be on Welfare for a while.

Bivins’s answer was an accommodating “Hop in,” and he drove them round town pointing out our monuments and old pre-mobile-homes homes and ten-floor skyscrapers and what not, not to get them hooked on the town so much as hooked on the Chevy, how it braked and scratched off with a burnt-rubber smell, mentioning that the SS red tape sometimes took a little time to unravel and they might find it handy to have a car at their disposal while they waited. In the end the Tollivers drove off in the green Chevy, leaving Bivins with a lien of some sort against the first three or four Welfare checks, and a lien of course against the Chevy; even so, a highly speculative position, except for the car’s being insured, might be “repossessed” (again), and the probability that Tolliver still had a little cash left from New York—which Bivins no doubt got some or most of there under the blinking letters of Home of Nothing Down.

It was not much later that frantic morning when a gray car with “Sheriff’s Dept.” on the sides and trunk went screaming past the lot followed by three wreckers jockeying for first place as if on the homestretch at Indianapolis, all headed west in the general direction of I-20, where “Mr. and Mrs. Leon S. Tolliver of Ash Island BWI” (the afternoon paper speaking) had been rolling along at a good clip down the left lane—the proper BWI lane—when a Transcon 18-wheeler “driven by ‘Dan the Fast Freight Man’” appeared in their windshield as if wrapped in the whistle of a diesel locomotive. The paper said Mr. Tolliver, “according to a hospital spokesperson,” had suffered “minor contusions and abrasions but was reported in stable condition;” Mrs. Tolliver’s condition however was, sadly enough, even more stable. She was, “according to the same source, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.”

All of this happening (though I wasn’t aware of it) at just about the time of my rash of phone calls and bringing on, with Bivins’s inspired help, the entanglements I have mentioned. For though we have integrated everything they told us to, schools, movies, hotels, restaurants, offices, drinking fountains, buses, rest rooms, we—and the Feds too—have somehow overlooked the most important rest room of all (quite possibly the excuse would be the staggering complications involved if the courts ruled the law to be retroactive, as they well might, given half a chance), I mean the cemeteries.

However the knotty point has been disposed of in the newer cemeteries it was in the separate-but-equal category in Papa Charles’s day—the Telfair Plot itself a sort of ultimate Homestead—and no one gave it any more thought than the grocery boy did about making deliveries in the kitchen instead of the front door, or the iceman with his melting 50-pound cube dripping down his neck. But such times are gone with the brown-wood icebox, and Bivins, in his role of model bastard, probably sensing the possibility of further harassment for Uncle Brownell, had a talk with Mr. Tolliver at his hospital bedside and was pleased to translate his sedated mumbles as agreeing with the inclinations of his (Bivins’s) own, after which he hurried away to The Homestead, relighting the smoldering half-Tamparino the nurses had forced him to pocket and clanging shut the wrought-iron gate from Bay Street (rarely closed) in a sort of auditory warning this was not an everyday social call. Without so much as a “Good afternoon” for either Uncle Brownell or the Judge he laid it out that Mr. Tolliver wished to have his wife buried—Bivins preferred “interred”—with his family.

“But naturally, Bivins,” Uncle Brownell said, sending a tolerating smile at the Judge as much as to say you couldn’t expect Bivins, as bastard, to be aware of all the time-honored niceties among families. “Where else would anyone choose to be buried?”

Bivins said he was glad they saw it eye-to-eye, and Uncle Brownell elaborated, with a glance for corroboration at the Judge and his legal background gazing out the French window into Bay Street, “No one would attempt to deny Right of Sepulture to a man wishing to bury his wife among his own people. I fail to see why you are consulting us.”

Bivins said, Okay, okay, to cough up the key.

Which Uncle Brownell not unnaturally thought he was misconstruing and said, “Beg pardon, Bivins?”

“The key to the family plot.”

“But, Bivins, we have no jurisdiction over the Tolliver plot. Or any of the plots in the—er—other cemetery. Quite possibly the proper undertaker can help you.”

Bivins said in a packing of dry smoke, “He’s talking about the Telfair Plot, the Telfair-Tolliver-Taliaferro-Taillefer-Telfair plot,” and Uncle Brownell, gasping from the words as well as from the charge of smoke and searching for a simple reply that wouldn’t bog down in the tangles of our family history, fell back after a minute on to the Southern device of sidestepping the main issue and said, “You must have misunderstood him, Bivins, nobody would want to bury his wife among a lot of people she didn’t know,” adding after a pause (in one of those gentle truncated “if” clauses with which we like to soften otherwise firm demands), “If you would be so good as to explain the matter to him, Bivins”—Bivins repeating the “be so good” as if it gave him the earache, and Uncle Brownell adding generously, “Extend to him, if you will, our sympathy in his troubles, and if we can be of any assistance in any way to please let us know—”

“‘In any way,’ Bubber?” the Judge broke in, legal senses tuned for concealed explosives.

“Well, this Social Security business he was asking about, Guy, does it ‘secure’ one all the way to the cemetery, or does it end at the back door of the hospital? I mean if his undertaker is the one worried about security you might say to him, Bivins, we stand ready—Guy?—to do the right thing,” Judge Fluther mumbling a watchful “within reason” to the French window, jingling the loose change in his pants pocket (not, I’d say, so much to underscore the boundaries of “within reason” as having the two money-based concepts enter his mind together, as a client at the office often brings along a friend).

Bivins, making no response to any of this, simply repeated that Mr. Tolliver wished to have his wife interred with his family and intended to do so, drawing on the cigar until he had loaded his chest like a cannon then exploding it all in a sinister War-of-1812 cloud at the portrait of Papa Charles over the mantelpiece (his grandfather-once-removed?), wired spectacles the size of quarters after inflation resting on his open Bible, branching out then to Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union and saying the ACLU would more than likely want to take the whole thing to the Supreme Court if Uncle Brownell had in mind getting his back up.

At which the Judge said, “Now, now,” in a defusing tone, and then, as if shaking a cape to draw Bivins off to another side of the ring, “When are you planning to have the funeral, Bivins?”

Bivins said he wasn’t planning nothing, just trying to help Mr. Tolliver, a good customer of his. (The wrecks were by then under the jurisdiction of the insurance people who would be sending in experts with 40-40 vision for combing the fine print in the policies—neither here nor there.) Of course he was really just trying to create trouble, in his bastardly way, particularly trouble for Uncle Brownell, jealous of him from the first and spreading it round among Lucinda and the others that Uncle Brownell had no right in a democratic family where everyone was equally equal to have latched on to the best room in The Homestead, what had been the parlor—crystal chandelier, marble fireplace, walk-out windows, porch on Bay Street with a slanted flagstaff on which he had run up both Union and Confederate flags to welcome home Private Spignor (Hospital Corpsman, I believe) from what Spignor called “Nam.” (“‘Trickle down!’” Bivins is supposed to have said to Lucinda—I hope not—“the only thing trickles down from that room is sanctimonious shit;” maybe he didn’t say it, you can’t believe Lucinda, telling me you have to show the editor two gut words in the first ten pages of a manuscript the way you flash your clearance card at the plant police to prove you belong there).

It was no use trying to placate Bivins by changing the approach but the Judge made a try, an old hand for years on the bench at hearing so many sides of a question you couldn’t remember the question; he told Bivins he was surprised Mr. Tolliver didn’t prefer to take his wife’s body back to the Island for burial. “I doubt if the cost differential would amount to much, what with the current rate of exchange. If cost is a deterrent the Family would perhaps help him out, something within reason—something from the Contingency Fund, Bubber? I believe we’d agree it is a contingency,” Uncle Brownell nodding his shoulders as well as his neck and head.

Bivins seemed to consider such a change, probably while he debated with himself the chances of having the helping-out check made out to “Cash,” but it was something that needed more consideration than he could spare at the moment and he fell back into the course he had been following and, hand on the cut-glass doorknob, threw out that Mr. Tolliver of course might “seek a restraining order,” the words alerting the worn legal ears of the Judge as the ping! of the bell in the firehouse used to alert the horses back in the merry days of my childhood.

He said, “‘Restraining order’?” and Bivins diagrammed it: “An injunction restraining all interments in the Telfair Plot until the complaint can be adjudicated,” the program raising an astounded cloud of unbelief (two clouds, counting Uncle Brownell’s) that might be compared to the indignation you feel at seeing a burglar entering your own window when you had been believing it was only other people’s windows that burglars entered. He interrupted the Judge’s upper-case “No court in the land—” by tacking on as he crossed the threshold that neither the Judge nor Uncle Brownell was such a spring chicken as to assume he might not need the plot at any time (the age-attack a standard karate lunge capable of breaking any self-assurance that got in its way—which it just about did in this case, leaving the two of them speechlessly studying the fine old parquet flooring).

Nothing in Bivins’s mind, needless to say, was meant to have any reference to Eastman and his problem (my problem) of which he had no knowledge at the time—though the two proposed uses of the Telfair Plot did seem to be bearing down on each other as ineluctably as the Tollivers’ green Chevy and Dan the Fast Freight Man (who incidentally, the paper said, was “thrown clear” into a small dogwood tree bordering the right of way).

The Judge, recovering first—a year or two closer to being a spring chicken—pulled open both French windows on account of the Tamparino and said to Uncle Brownell, “I suggest, Bubber, you call Sam Grimes and have him get an off-the-cuff estimate on air-mailing Mrs. Tolliver to Ash Island in case Tolliver can be brought to reason; at least we’d know the probable extent of the burn. I’ll call him if you like.” And Uncle Brownell, coming to rest between the arms of his padded rocker a little like a ferryboat caroming off one side of the slip then the other to slow him down, said, “Will you do that, please, Guy?” the Judge adding as if reading it out of the phone book, “It might pay us in the long run, Bubber, to buy Mr. Tolliver a ticket too, he might just accept it if he had it right there in his hand.”

Uncle Brownell’s answer was that he thought he would lie down for a few minutes.

All this unknown to me when I talked to Eastman, and still unknown when Doshia called up back at the Press to say she had been in touch with Mrs. Eastman (Eastman “on another line, so busy, poor dear”) and been able to straighten everything out nicely. They would be down late tomorrow, don’t bother to meet them, they would phone in from the airport and would be pleased to stay anywhere we might care to fit them in; the ashes were being handled Air Express directly between the Chicago man and Mr. Grimes—Doshia interposing an exasperated “If that’s the way they want it, Bob, well!” adding, “I’ve just talked to Mr. Sam and he knows all about it. He will meet the plane and take care of everything. Saint Michael’s, of course. I’m calling the Rector now, confirming it, a lovely young man, also named Michael, don’t you think that’s nice, Bob, the same name as your boss, I don’t mean ‘boss,’ you know what I mean, he will arrange it all for Saturday morning though Saturday is his busy day, I’ll leave it with you to get the key, good-by,” all very one-two-three, Doshia as limber and light-footed as a professional warming up for the finals on the courts at Wimbledon.

I said I hoped I could get back in time, I had to go to Rockbridge on business for the Cotton Lane Press, but she was gone. And wouldn’t ever have heard of the Cotton Lane Press anyway, our family no more given to looking into books than breaking into other people’s houses.

But getting the key seemed the least I could do after all the foot-dragging I had displayed and I called The Homestead, “Baker, Brownell T.” in the phone book. Judge Fluther was taking the calls, would I talk to him? Mr. Baker was resting. I said, “Yes sir, Judge, how are you? This is Bob Otis.”

“WHO!”

“Otis, Judge. Robert Otis.”

He said, “Oh yes, Curtis, go ahead,” and I told him about Eastman’s “Dad” (whom he couldn’t place, mixed him up with some long-gone great-granduncle of Papa Charles). He said there’d be no problem about “Dad,” “clearly one of the family if he was ‘in cotton’”; the problem was how to settle out of court a certain complex legal action they were threatened with, going on to explain, full of it, that this might be done if they could persuade “a Mr. Tolliver” to take his wife home to the Caribbean for burial. “Mr. Grimes is getting us a figure on the freight if we have to pay it with a draw-out from the Contingency Fund—‘freight’ doesn’t sound right, Bivins has got us all a little upset. What did you say your name was?”

“Otis, sir. Robert Otis.”

“Yes. Well, Mr. Oakes, it’s hard to explain it all over the phone—”

I broke in to say that Doshia had asked me to get the key, and we were off again with “Who?” and “Doshia, sir. I’ve forgotten her last name” and “I don’t know of any kosher kinspeople.” I said I’d be along in a few minutes.

I found that they had talked it over and decided that “Dad” was old Jack Pelham who had been in the cotton business in town for years until one January he sold a farmer’s cotton that was stored in one of his warehouses (off Cotton Lane, “Cotton Alley” then)—at 45¢ expecting the market to fall on the Government Forecast and to buy it back at 35¢ or 25¢ or what not, Mr. Cairo, the farmer, none the wiser. But the market went the other way and when it reached 65¢ Mr. Cairo wired him to sell his 103 bales (of 500-lbs. each, approximately) at the market—a matter of some $34,000, for which Mr. Pelham had received about $23,000. Not in itself a disaster, except that Mr. Cairo’s cotton was only part of the 700-odd bales he had sold, and he decided to close up and move to another state, the Judge wasn’t sure which one but it might have been Illinois. Only distant kin anyway, the Pelhams, and having nothing to do with the problem of Eastman’s “Dad” and the Bohlens; which I tried to explain, only confusing them further until I pointed out that even if “Dad” had been old Jack Pelham himself, as one of us the family would hardly have, in Uncle Brownell’s words, “denied him the right of sepulture” and Uncle Brownell after an exchange of looks with the Judge searched his rolltop and with a change of spectacles eventually came up with the key tagged Telfair Plot, Drive-in Gate.

I left it with one of Mr. Grimes’s velvet-toned young men at what you might call Mr. Grimes’s studio, Mr. Grimes himself on the phone to the airport arranging for a seemly delivery of “Dad’s” ashes the next morning.—The phone at the Press was ringing when I climbed the stairs as if reeling me into another element like a fish. When I picked it up a woman said, “Hello, Wife Saver? Send me two orders of broiled—” I broke in to say she had the wrong wife saver; I was as glad to hear the sleepy buzz as to see a cop in my rearview mirror turn off into a side street.

I would rather not go into the matter of delivering my manuscript at the Starlite Rollerway but the outcome was important in determining whether or not I could get back for the service—the services. The Family Reunion. It didn’t really seem quite right to abandon my kin to their solemnities while I chased off to another town with a pair of skates (on business, true enough, but not denying the possibility of a little relaxation, Congressional Junket in a small way), but after all, as some ancient writer has it, “God formed his world with vicissitudes of day and night, spring and autumn, thus refreshing us by change in our surroundings.”

I was rather taken aback, as I walked in, by the beautiful whispering hum already singing under the great dome of the Starlite instead of the steel-on-wood (wood-on-wood?) roar of the latest rink I could remember: everything was already under way, single skaters circling with flailing arms at the desperate speed of bank robbers under fire, now and then a crash and slide and rubberized bouncing-up recovery, any number of lively ladies twirling negligible skirts, bottoms flashing like the lights on patrol cars, a few pairs hand-in-hand in linked orbit, legs synchronized to a gentle raining music out of the Starlite’s dim cosmos, pairs pausing now and then to allow the lady to pirouette as if dangling from the gentleman’s fingers like a warming-up lariat at a rodeo. Nothing that resembled Becky and Number Two I thought, until one of the circling pairs, nibbling back and forth at something on a stick, seemed to take shape through the anonymity like a far-off constellation in a telescope and I recognized her in spite of her twisted-up hair.

Even to this point intending to defy the whispering plastic, acetate, or what-not, and the Day-Glow polyurethane wheels attached to high-top suede boots, to confront all that by clamping on, strapping on, my newly-oiled steel rollers, I sat on a bench and faced the fact that the straps would buckle above my shoe-tops, against my socks in fact—adding, I could foresee, a further deterrence of pinched ankles to my shrinking resolution. Something made me look up, certainly no skate-sound, and there was Becky (three inches taller than last week) and a boy with a bold moustache who I supposed was Number Two—no old-time fooling around with introductions.

And not much chance for introductions anyway: young patrons whizzing in from all directions on some mysterious signal like a skyful of robins soundlessly flocking in as if my skates were sunflower seeds, gathering round like fledgling paleontologists to view the wing-bone of some pterodactyl, comments ranging from “Wow, but this is major!” to “Wow, they’re the pits!” One of them, handling a skate, I was delighted to have break a dried-out strap, saving me from having to demonstrate how their grandfathers used the things—Number Two getting tired of all the ohs-and-ahs, kissing Becky on an intimate lobe of her pink ear and whipping away to where he had parked his shoes.

She watched him go as if he had been a missed bus with another right behind it then said affectionately, “He’s shy,” and asked me if I could give her a ride home. I said I certainly could.

“Unless you’d like to buy a decent pair for a couple of hundred? No? Or rent a pair? You’d never get the flow with those relics.”

I thanked her for the thought (thoughts); I said it was late and I was hungry. Her suggestion of “quiche with bacon bits over there” I turned down with, “Let’s go get something good, Expense-Account good—on the Cotton Lane Press.”

Which we did, a place she knew about, had been to before (she didn’t say so but I could tell—probably with Number One); not as elegant at second glance as at first but pleasant enough, white tablecloths, banquettes, a bar, some pairs dancing at the far end in the disconnected don’t-know-you style as though on any drumbeat they might stamp off and go their own way—far removed from my last warm clutching whirls encountering an occasional knee.

The elegance was further diluted, I felt, by the homey discord of waitresses instead of waiters, making me wonder if the management might be counting on the mild diversion of hems and legs to distract from shortcomings in the kitchen, borne out by the dishes I ordered and the look of hers; the music far enough away to allow a sort of holding-pattern of talk in which we circled on a long radius over book manufacturing, book selling, book writing, my manuscript (“This ‘Fisherman’ of yours, Bob, is he fresh-water or deep-sea?” “Oh, deep-sea, mid-ocean,” dodging. “The manuscript, Bob! Where is it?” “In the car.” “You oughtn’t to leave it round like that. I knew a writer once who took his to bed with him”), closing in on a few questions about myself, not many, and about her—Business School at the University … back to the farm every weekend until a professor in Corporate Structure helped her to break loose … Johnny Sanders took her to see his uncle … good job, she liked to see the country, liked Johnny—and finally over a pair of saw-toothed liqueurs my mentioning I wanted to see the Atlanta Braves (nothing further from my wants, they’ll always be “The Boston Braves” for me anyway) and would she care to drive up with me sometime and take in a game? She said, “Yes, of course,” answering too quickly, I assumed, to realize it meant overnight; the “sometime” I figured might be pushed forward to next week, Eastman disposed of, Telfair gate relocked, key returned to rolltop desk.

I had the waitress put the bill—something so breathtaking (for me, homebody) I had to unfold my glasses to believe I was reading $78.93—on a credit card and when she returned with the ticket for me to sign, and add on the transport charge for delivering the material (the menu figures were f.o.b. the kitchen of course) I decided it would be more impressive to my guest if I paid the handling charge in cash; she would never have noticed if I added it at the bottom in the open space clutching for it, doing things to her face while studiously taking the position the bill did not exist. Another incentive of course was to further impress my guest with the smiles and bows and well-wishings of the waitress, revivifying to myself too after my Rollerway comedown. So, with a feint at nonchalance, the bills as reluctant to leave my warm wallet as my cats hauled out of a blanket, I handed the waitress two $10 bills (rather handsome of me, I thought). For which I received a brief nod, and left under rather a cloud—so similar to the cloud obscuring the Starlite I felt I would have been happier staying home for the funeral (funerals).