Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [39]
“Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“Yeh. That’s right. Wal, it reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid, when I was working on a ranch with him summers. He used to talk about how we were descended from some English lord, too.”
“Really.”
“I’m not kidding. Most of our ancestors back in England were just plain folks, he said, but there was one called Charles Mumpson, the same name as him and me, back around Revolutionary times, who was some kind of great lord. He lived on a big estate down in the southwestern part of the country and was a famous local character. Kind of a wise man. He didn’t sleep in his castle, my grandfather said; he stayed in a cave out in the woods. And he wore a special costume, sort of a long coat made from the fur of about a dozen different animals. He was called The Hermit of Southley, and people came from all over the countryside to see him.”
“Really,” Vinnie says again, but with a different intonation. For the first time she feels a professional interest in Chuck Mumpson.
“So anyway, I got the notion that while I’m here I should try and look up this guy and find out more about him and all our ancestors over here. Except I don’t know how to proceed. I went to the public library, but I couldn’t locate anything, I didn’t even know where to start. The trouble is, these dukes and knights and things have a lot of different names, sometimes three or four to a family. And there isn’t any place in that part of the country called Southley.” He grins, shrugs. “I tried to phone you, to get some help, but I must have taken down the number wrong. I got a laundry instead.”
“Mm.” Vinnie naturally doesn’t explain that she had deliberately altered one digit of her number. “Well, there are some standard places you might look,” she says. “There’s the Society of Genealogists, for instance.”
While Chuck writes down her suggestions, Vinnie thinks that his quest is also standard: the typical middlebrow, middleclass, nominally democratic American search for a connection with the British aristocracy—for “ancestors,” a family history, a coat of arms, a local habitation, and a noble name.
Conventional, tiresome. But the particular details of Chuck’s family legend are intriguing to a folklorist: the eccentric lord and local sage clothed in a patchwork of furs in his woodland cave. Mad deistic philosopher? Follower of Rousseau? Herb doctor? Wizard? Or even possibly, in the local folk imagination, the incarnation of some pagan god of the forest, part beast and part man? Half-formed wraiths of a short but rather interesting article stir in her mind. It also amuses her to think of Chuck as, in a debased and transatlantic form, the final incarnation of this classic folk figure—by coincidence, from the southwestern part of his own country and dressed in assorted animal skins.
When the bill arrives, Vinnie, as usual, insists upon paying her share. Some of her friends attribute this to feminist principles; but though Vinnie accepts their interpretation her policy well predates the women’s movement. Essentially, it reflects a deep dislike of being under obligation to anyone. Chuck protests that he owes her something anyhow for her advice; but she reminds him that he got her a ride to London on the Sun Tour bus, so they are now quits.
“Wal. All right.” Chuck crumples up Vinnie’s pound notes in his large red fist. “You know, you remind me of a teacher I had once in fourth grade. She was real nice. She . . .”
Vinnie listens to Chuck’s recollections without comment. It is her fate to remind almost everyone she meets of a teacher they had once.
“Anyhow. What I wanted to say is, it looks like I’m going to be in London a while longer. Maybe we could get together again sometime, have lunch.”
Vinnie declines tactfully; she’s awfully busy this week, she lies. But why doesn’t Chuck let her know how he gets on with his research? She gives him her telephone number—correctly this time—and also her address. If he really wants to find out anything,