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they do here. Against the backdrop of that physical imposingness, his taste in dress was unexpected and ran somehow counter to his personality as well, which was self-assured, soft-spoken, and reserved. Claire liked that reserve the way she liked her great-grandmother’s heavy silver, but she also liked to rattle it. And she was well aware that Marcel, however he pretended otherwise, liked to have it rattled in just the way she’d made her specialty.
“Sorry, y’all,” she told the company, regressing, for some reason, to a Southern accent. “Marcel and I have known each other since God was a boy in shorts; I’m like the maiden aunt and he’s the five-year-old whose cheeks I sometimes have to pinch.”
“You were in the Ransom Hill Band together, I believe,” Deanna said, a trifle sternly.
“Oh, yes,” said Claire, “I was part of Marcel’s disreputable past. We knew each other way before that, though. We met when we were fourteen, in boarding school. I was at Northfield when Cell—excuse me, Marcel—was at Mt. Hermon. He had this terrible crush on my roommate, Shanté Mills.”
“Not Shanté Mills, the mezzo,” Jessup said.
“The same.”
“I have a crush on her!”
“You and everybody else,” Claire said, “including my husband, Ransom. But that’s another story. Do you see his earring?”
“I don’t think we need the earring story, Claire,” said the dean, who wore a small gold stud in his left ear.
“Should we take a vote?” Claire polled the group’s expanding membership, and everybody raised a black-sleeved arm, except Deanna Holmes.
“You probably know he’s from Manhattan. His family has a manse on Morningside and a summer place in Vineyard Haven. They’re fixtures at Abyssinian Baptist. Marcel was once the chapter president of a nifty little club called Jack and Jill. He came to Mt. Hermon from St. Bernard’s, and his first year he went around in a blue blazer with a little crest on the pocket and these heavy oxblood shoes. Somewhere in England, little men with jeweler’s lenses on their specs had a wooden last shaped to his foot, and when his mother, Miss Corinne, put in a call they took it off the shelf and whipped young Marcel out a brand-new pair. And he had these really awful glasses, too, like…” Claire glanced involuntarily toward Deanna Holmes, then caught herself and looked away. “These thick black things, and a fro like Sly Stone, circa 1969. It was generally lopsided from where he slept on it and had specks of towel lint and the occasional bird’s nest. And he was in, like, Latin 6 or some ridiculous course they had to invent for him, and he carried around this special pair of drumsticks. What were they, Cell?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “And Linus doesn’t remember his Binky. Come on, you know…. You know you know. Zildjian 5A’s, right?”
“Zildjian didn’t even make sticks then. They may have been Vic Firths.”
“But he doesn’t remember,” she said. “And you know those shiny metal rails in the cafeteria? You’d be pushing your tray along, waiting for the lady in the paper hat to ladle gravy on your mashed, and suddenly, rattatatta rattatatta, ‘Wipeout!’ and that creepy little laugh? He had it down. The whole line, twenty, thirty people, would groan in unison, and pelt him with a hail of napkin balls. And, oh, yes, I should also mention that he was the worst basketball player on the team, possibly the worst in the whole history of the school, and, in short, he was just so hopelessly uncool that Shanté and I took pity and adopted him.”
Claire knew she was getting on a tear with this, but something in Marcel just drew it out of her and always had. Though not Southern in the least, he was like Southern gentlemen she’d grown up with, and, most especially, like that Southern gentleman of Southern gentlemen, her father, Gardener DeLay, who, in the bloom of apparent health, was struck down by a massive heart attack when she was seventeen. Claire’s mother had been the dominating figure in the household. Before her descent into Alzheimer’s, Rose DeLay had been a noted Charleston personality, a tongue-in-cheek provocateuse who specialized in that peculiarly Southern, female form of humor, lobbing burnished epigrams of gay, off-color wit like Molotov cocktails at cotillions, garden parties, and assorted charity events. Rose sucked the oxygen from the drawing rooms where Claire grew up. After bringing down the house with her command performances, however, she frequently got vapors and retired to bed with a compress on her eyes. On these occasions, Gardener made Claire grilled-cheese sandwiches downstairs, cutting off the crusts the way she liked. They dunked these in tomato soup, a trespass so egregious that Gardener put a finger to his lips and Claire crossed her heart, agreeing to conspire. Gardener and Rose…Their names so perfectly expressed their natures and their roles that the in-joke spread beyond the family and permeated the whole town. Claire blamed herself, but in her heart of hearts she always loved him more. In a crowd, Gardener did not require centrality the way her mother had. Rather, he conferred it. There was something in the quality of his attention that made you feel singled out and special, as though bathed in the gold light from a photographer’s umbrella. Marcel’s attention was like that, too. Even now, in this new crowd of virtual strangers not all disposed to be her friends, it brought Claire out. In their youth at boarding school, she’d taken this for granted, but now, since moving back to Wando Passo, she didn’t anymore. Just lately, Claire thought about this subject quite a bit.
“Behind his back, we called him ‘the mascot with the ascot,’” she went on. “Did you know that, Dr. Jones?”
The dean, however, was in distress and couldn’t answer, choking on a hilarity he clearly wanted to suppress, and couldn’t, and as he chuffed and panted and waved his hand in a negating motion—meaning, no, he did not remember, or simply that he wanted her to stop—his