The Windsor Knot (9 page)

Not that the American custom of bridesmaids was much better. The bride was expected to choose her sister, her fiancé’s sister, and a few close friends or cousins as attendants, preferably the most presentable looking of her acquaintances, so as not to
blight the wedding pictures. Ruefully, Elizabeth remembered her own summons to serve as bridesmaid for Cousin Eileen, whom she barely knew. She had hated the malarial yellow dress chosen for her.
I’m as bad off as Eileen was
, she thought.
I don’t have anybody to ask. How thoughtless of Cameron and me not to have sisters. We’re all right on brothers: Ian and Bill, for best man and usher, and presumably Charles and Geoffrey can usher. But that presupposes having four woman attendants. Not possible
.

It was at this moment of desperation that Elizabeth remembered a childhood vow made with her then-best friend Jenny Ramsay, when during an orgy of sentiment watching
Pride and Prejudice
they had promised to be bridesmaids in each other’s wedding. Elizabeth’s family had moved to Virginia when she was in the tenth grade, so she and Jenny had not experienced the caste system of high school together. Gradually they lost touch. She hadn’t heard from Jenny in years. Elizabeth seemed to recall that she had gone to college at Agnes Scott—or was it Meredith? She remembered Jenny as a perky, fun-loving blonde whose idols in life were Donny Osmond and, in her
I Dream of Jeannie
days, Barbara Eden. Assuming that Jenny had not fulfilled her youthful dream of residing in a bottle in the home of an astronaut, she was probably still somewhere in the vicinity of Chandler Grove. (Burger King, thought Elizabeth uncharitably, remembering Jenny’s grade-point average in junior high.)

When Elizabeth telephoned Aunt Amanda to ask about the whereabouts of Jenny Ramsay, she was surprised that her aunt recognized the name at once. She was even more surprised to learn that Jenny, far from sporting a paper hat and serving
fast food, was part of the news team on the local television station. Elizabeth had written her a long chatty letter, summarizing a few years of achievements and adventures, and ended by telling her about the Queen’s garden party and asking Jenny to be her maid of honor. The reply arrived a few days later, on a cat notecard:
Love to! Call me when you get back to C. Grove!

So that was settled. Jenny for maid of honor and Mary Clare from the anthropology department as a bridesmaid. (“Be sure you take notes during the ceremony!” Jake had urged her.)

Elizabeth, busy with her plans, sped past the mountain vistas of 1-77 and down into the pine forests of middle Carolina with hardly a glance at the scenery.

   Geoffrey drew aside the curtain and gazed out at the winding gravel driveway. “I thought she’d be here by now, didn’t you?” he remarked to his brother Charles. “Of course, the trip probably takes longer with mice and pumpkin.”

“Pumpkin?” said Charles, whose inattention was evident. “What are you talking about?”

“It was a literary reference. Remember Cinderella? I was alluding to Cousin Elizabeth’s fondness for building castles in the air and then moving into them.”

Charles did not bother to reply, as this might be interpreted by Geoffrey as an inducement to stay. Charles had retreated to the musty depths of the Chandler library to commune with his thoughts, and he had enjoyed a quiet hour of brandy and contemplation in the leather chair next to the fireplace. The interruption by Geoffrey, who insisted upon pulling back the velvet curtains and peering out the window while making inane remarks, was
most unwelcome. Charles had just completed some soul-searching and found to his chagrin that he had remarkably little area to cover. The depression resulting from this discovery had made the prospect of a visit with his adder-tongued brother even more painful than usual.

Geoffrey, blissfully unaware of the dread he inflicted, prattled on about the family’s current obsession. “I should be learning my lines for the play, of course, but I doubt that I shall get much chance with all the distractions to come. Still, I expect that I shall find Elizabeth’s royalty fantasies highly entertaining. Although, Lord knows, Southern brides are prone to it with less provocation than she has. Did you ever notice that?”

“What?” murmured Charles. He was holding his brandy snifter in both hands, as if he expected the spirits therein to offer the sort of career advice Macbeth had received.

“About Southern brides’ royalty fantasies,” said Geoffrey, warming to his topic. “A couple of weeks before the wedding, they all come down with a strange personality disorder. It’s characterized by delusions of grandeur, obsession with ritual, and a tendency toward ruthless tyranny.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“I expect you will, Charles. I predict that within hours of her arrival, Elizabeth will turn this place into the court of Catherine the Great. The brides can’t help it, I suppose. Southern women are raised on rosy images of Scarlett O’Hara and all the beautiful belles of Southern mythology. You know, the fiery little minx who breaks men’s hearts.” He shuddered. “We tend to encourage that image of femininity, wouldn’t you say?”

Charles shrugged. “I don’t pretend to be an expert on femininity.”

Geoffrey reddened. “Nor do I, but we in the theatre make it a point to study all of humankind. You should hear my analysis of
you
. But as I was saying, here are all these Southern girls, fancying that the best thing to be is a belle—only they are never given the opportunity. In today’s world, there’s college, dressing for success in your sensible job, and a social scene based on the
pretense
of equality, at least. Which is, of course, exactly what they desire—or ought to desire—but they have this peculiar idea drilled into their head by elderly female relatives that to be
feminine
is to be a silly, pouting coquette.”

“Ugh,” said Charles, whose idea of foreplay was the Mensa exam.

“I quite agree,” purred Geoffrey. “And I do think that modern Southern women ignore this conditioning admirably well. The only time they really succumb to the belle fantasy is when they are about to become brides. That’s when tradition takes over—”

“Something old, something new
…” murmured Charles, sipping his drink.

“Something Scarlett,” said Geoffrey. “The wedding belle. A formal wedding is every woman’s chance to star in
Gone With the Wind
. For a few short weeks she is the bride, able to throw scenes, to make people wait on her, and to be the absolute center of attention. This is how she thinks she ought to behave. It has very little to do with the institution of matrimony, as far as I can tell. It’s an ancient and terrible ritual. We’re in for it, I tell you.”

“So if Cousin Elizabeth starts throwing tantrums, we tell her to put a sock in it.”

Geoffrey shook his head. “It’s not going to be that easy.”

Clearly intending that to be his exit line, Geoffrey strolled toward the door, but their conversation had reminded Charles of something. He motioned for his brother to stay. “Listen, before you go, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” he began awkwardly.

“Yes, Charles, what is it? Do say that you are asking me to recommend a good hairdresser, because I have been so hoping—”

Charles scowled and swept a dark forelock away from his eyes. “I don’t need a haircut!”

Geoffrey closed his eyes dramatically. “Perhaps a defoliant …”

“What I wanted to ask you was—” He was blushing furiously. “Oh, this is ridiculous. Never mind!”

“Now you
have
gained my attention,” Geoffrey announced. “Out with it, Charles. What advice can I offer? A tailor’s reference? Singing lessons, perhaps? Have you been mispronouncing wines?”

“No.” Charles was sullen, as people usually were after more than ten minutes of Geoffrey Chandler. “I’d like to know how you meet girls around here.”

His brother favored him with an acid smile. “In your case, Charles, I should recommend setting snares.” This was Geoffrey’s second attempt at an exit, but this time his curiosity got the better of him. “Just what
is
going on?” he demanded. “And why come to me? Surely you know that Mother would be delighted to throw you to the social wolves if you so much as indicated your willingness to go.”

Charles paled. “No. I don’t want to attend dances or anything like that. I’d just like to meet someone nice. It’s time I thought about settling down with someone who’s my type. You know, involved in the sciences.”

“What a pity for you that Typhoid Mary is no
longer with us.” Geoffrey deemed that exit line too good to pass up, and so he left.

   Jenny Ramsay was touched and pleased to hear from her old friend Elizabeth after so many years, but she did not share her friend’s elation about a marriage day that coincided with the birthday of Princess Diana. In a way, Jenny had been Princess Diana for several years now and quite often she found it a royal pain.

This was one of those times.

As usual, she was impeccably dressed: pink linen suit, ruffled blouse with a satin ribbon at the neck, and her trademark double strand of cultured pearls. Her hair was a smooth, blonde bob, perfectly disciplined to stay in place, just short of her tiny gold earrings, and her heart-shaped face was carefully made up to look not made up at all. She wore her usual expression of sincere and urgent
interest
, suggesting that the present discussion of gardening strategies and shrubbery upkeep was the high point of her week.

In fact she was bored shitless.
(Not
an expression that anyone had ever heard Jenny Ramsay use, but she
thought
it a lot.) In her capacity as honorary chairperson and goodwill ambassador to the rest of Georgia, she was attending a board meeting of the local County Beautification Committee, and her fellow committee members had been holding forth for a good hour and a half, which is a long time to have to smile and look fascinated by utter drivel. Jenny was trying to think of a plausible yet foolproof way of escape.

Jenny Ramsay had graduated from college with a sorority pin, a C average, and a degree in communications, which she hoped to parlay into a career in show business. In the spring of her senior
year, she had entered the local pageant of the Miss Georgia contest, in hopes of gaining some media attention, useful to job seekers who are short on marketable skills. Thanks to several years of aerobics classes with her sorority sisters, she looked all right for the swimsuit competition (though it felt rather strange to be parading around a crowded auditorium with hardly anything on). “Take out your contact lenses,” a pageant official advised her. “It’s a lot easier if the audience is just one big blur.”

The evening-gown event was delightful. She had worn a turquoise ball gown that needed only a wand to make her look like a fairy princess, and she was sure that the judges gave her higher marks than anybody in that category.

Jenny’s real problem with the pageant was the talent portion of the program. Jenny couldn’t sing—and her notions of dancing involved a drunken DKE for a partner and a very loud dose of beach music. It was then that she discovered she had entered the pageant fifteen years too late. The true contenders had been competing since the age of four, when ambitious and farsighted mothers enrolled them in piano, ballet, and modern-dance classes. On the advice of one of her communications professors, Jenny ended up doing Emily in the last act of
Our Town
, but she lost the crown to a cellist from Milton’s Forge, whose ambitions were to become a speech therapist and end world hunger.

The pageant had not been a total loss, however. One of the judges had been an executive from the local television station, and he had seen a perky quality in Jenny Ramsay that he thought would add just the right spark to the Channel Four news team. They already had the anchor duo—Bill (an overgrown Boy Scout) and Victoria (dark-haired and serious)—and sports announcer Badger Darnell,
whose knee injury had sidelined him from a pro baseball career. Jenny was young and inexperienced, but the station thought that with a little coaching, Jenny Ramsay could corner the ratings for north Georgia.

She was hired to announce the weather on the six o’clock news, but although the public saw this as her principal function, it was, in fact, a small part of her duties, mostly involving reading prepared forecasts supplied to the station by actual meteorologists. Jenny’s part in the process was to wear cute outfits, read the teleprompter with accuracy and convincing sincerity while pointing to the correct spot on the map (you
had
to know which one was Alabama and which one was Mississippi), and to function as the so-called little sister of the news team. Jenny was the one who cooed over feature stories about animals and who talked about snowball fights with Badger when snow was in the forecast.

The station’s plans for Jenny involved much more than telling people whether or not to take umbrellas to work. They wanted a princess. Local news teams were small-town America’s answer to royalty, they reasoned. Actually, they didn’t reason it, as hardly anyone in television ever comes up with an idea independently. What they did was to go to a broadcasters’ conference in Chicago, where they attended a seminar on “The Rating Value of News-Team Members as Community Celebrities.”

The workshop speaker had, in fact, explained to the audience that media personalities performed the same functions in Middle America that the British royals did for the public in the United Kingdom. They lent their names to worthy causes, rode in parades, and served as figureheads and spokesmen for various civic projects. For the royal family, the
rewards were an allowance from the civil list and a few castles to live in; for their American counterparts, it translated into ratings for the news-team celebrities’ television station.

The Channel Four executives discussed this revelation on the plane back to Atlanta and they decided that of their four newspeople, perky blonde Jenny Ramsay had the most potential for the role of community royal. She was wholesomely pretty rather than sexy, so that while men would find her attractive, women would still approve of her; she was young, inexperienced, and unmarried, which meant that her salary was not great, and her chances of relocating were small; and best of all, she was not terribly bright, which meant that she could discharge the endless social functions without going insane from boredom. Jenny Ramsay, the Weather Princess, was Channel Four’s answer to prayer.