Silver Currents of Change

Chapter 2

"Honneee! You eatin' breakfast here today?"

Yelling from the kitchen, Harvey Wilson's wife's words jarred his mind loose from his thoughts.

"Hun!" she yelled again. "You want to eat here? Or are you goin' down to that God forsaken Fish 'n Grits place you love. Just 'cause it's owned and run by colored folk. I mean. Cook is colored, so I don't know why you couldn't just eat here."

He'd asked her a million times to stop yelling from the kitchen, and now he knew. Asking her again was about as pointless as asking her to stop using the word "colored." He would have to remember to apologize to the cook. Again. 

Standing in the huge room that was his walk-in closet and dressing room, he was deciding what to wear that day since he was leaving for campus soon. He needed to stop by his office at Wilson Publishing first, and, rubbing his new beard, he was wondering if he'd blow his disguise by going to Jackson City University. He could be seen and recognized there, so he'd have to be careful while keeping his promise to meet that morning with the dean, Jared Broderick, his long-time friend and golfing buddy.

"You eatin' breakfast here today?"

When he looked up, Dinah, his wife, was standing in the doorway to his closet with her arms crossed. "Sakes alive, hon," she said. "You look like you haven't shaved in weeks."

He stared at her wondering why she hadn't noticed he'd been growing a beard over the past few weeks. "Oh, that might be because I haven't shaved in weeks."

She held up one hand as a stop sign. "Don't even tell me why—I'm a hundred-percent sure I don't want to know. I guess it's one your secret undercover things, so you just keep it a secret, you hear? You want breakfast?"

He knew she understood what was going on, even if she hadn't paid close enough attention to  know he was starting his third week of not shaving. "Sure," he said. "Let's eat together out on the deck."

"Ah, I'm having brunch a little later with a few friends." She looked at her nails. "So, ah, I'm skipping breakfast. But Janice says yours will be ready in fifteen."

"I'll get dressed." He looked back toward his closet. "Tell her I'll be out on the deck in ten."

"I'll let her know."

Watching her leave, Harvey smiled and started thinking about how much his wife loved having household staff to boss around. Then he thought, maybe, it was just something else she had to get used to.

He grew up in a home with servants, and even though his stepmother hadn't, she never "luxuriated" in the idea of having people to boss around, not the way his wife did. Growing up, as servants were cleaning or waiting on children or even when they were waiting on Mary Jean, his stepmother never treated them the way his wife treated their household staff. He spent quite a bit of time forgiving Dinah, chalking her attitude up as something else her trailer-park upbringing might still be influencing—and not in a good way.

Years ago, after getting to know her better, he decided to view as humorous how pretentious his spouse was. Even when it came to their servants, she was pretentious. She made sure they always wore maid's uniforms and that they addressed her and him as Ma'am, and Sir. He thought it was ridiculous. Fake. Snobby. Snotty. And grandiose. Pretentiousness seemed to be yet another "coping mechanism" Dinah Wilson needed to distance herself from her Rolling Fork, Mississippi childhood.

Her childhood was something she still wouldn't talk to him about, and from the time they married five years ago, whenever he asked about it, she always found a way to dismiss it, quickly. She was an expert at shifting attention from one thing to another. If he insisted, she'd just say she didn't want to talk about it because it was "horrid, loathsome, unspeakable, and completely awful."

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He decided to dress casually for his visit to the JCU campus that morning for his meeting with his friend. Once he was ready, he walked from his and Dinah's enormous downstairs master-bedroom suite, across a veritable lake of white marble flooring in the grand room, past a mammoth Gothic staircase and several ostentatious statues, until he finally got to the kitchen, and then out to the deck where he often dined. Sometimes even with his wife.

Like Dinah, their home's Louis XVI furnishings were extremely expensive and brazenly pretentious. Every room was filled to the brim with exaggerated extravagance. A twentieth century French chateau style mansion, it was once owned by an old Southern gentleman, a man of considerable wealth. Only it was much, much too much, just like Dinah. Its gold-leaf finished, antique Versailles tables, chairs, and fixtures always made Harvey feel uncomfortable. Cold and unwelcoming, nothing about the home was cozy. After spending a whole weekend there, he always found himself looking forward to getting back to his downtown office building. As his construction company was building the H. E. Wilson downtownoffice park several years earlier, he instructed the architects, designers, andinterior decorators to make Wilson Publishing's domicile an "elegant andcozy home away from home," as much as possible, and that was what they haddone. Since Dinah didn't like being involved with anything connected to hiswork, his wife's showy, pompous, "comfort-challenged" over-the-top tastein decor hadn't been hard to keep out of it.

Instead of buying the French chateau they called home, Harvey wanted them to build an estate in South Jackson, on the more rural edge of the city, in Lake Bellwood. He owned twenty acres there, next to his father's estate, on the other side of the massive man-made lake from his brother's ranch. But Dinah wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to live near "old money," she told him, where she could be near "her dear friends." She wouldn't admit it, but he knew she hated the idea of living near his parents, and that she loved telling her socialite friends their North Jackson home was previously owned and built by Sir Regis Blankenship. The knight was a man whose name was respected and revered in his wife's social world, because Her Majesty the Queen of England had bestowed the honor upon him after he became a U.K. citizen. The way the story went, after living in England for thirty-five years, Mr. Blankenship was recognized by the Queen for meritorious service to the Commonwealth, for his countless noteworthy accomplishments in business, charity, and education. Eventually, he left Europe and returned to his Mississippi ancestral property in a far north corner of Jackson. There, he built and lived in a home he named "Pinehaven," after his parents' estate, which, since he was a knight, wasn't regal enough for him. So, he had the home razed and built a mansion he felt was better suited for a man of his caliber and breeding. Sir Regis lived at Pinehaven for thirty years before moving into the area's most expensive assisted-living village, at the ripe old age of ninety-five.

Dinah only met Sir Regis one time, at the closing of the sale of Pinehaven. But to listen to his wife speak about the man, on the phone or to anyone unlucky enough to be visiting there and getting the "tour," Harvey was sure any hearer probably believed—as Dinah wanted them to, that she and the knight had been lifelong friends. 

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