The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [55]
Mount Vernon was everything Williamsburg should have been and was not – genuine, interesting, instructive. For well over a century it has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and what a lucky thing it is we have them. Amazingly, when the house was put up for sale in 1853, neither the federal government nor the state of Virginia was prepared to buy it for the nation. So a group of dedicated women hastily formed the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, raised the money to buy the house and 200 acres of grounds and then set about restoring it to precisely as it was in Washington’s day, right down to the correct pigments of paint and patterns of wallpaper. Thank God John D. Rockefeller didn’t get hold of it. Today the Association continues to run it with a dedication and skill that should be models to preservation groups everywhere, but alas are not. Fourteen rooms are open to the public and in each a volunteer provides an interesting and well-informed commentary – and is sufficiently clued-up to answer almost any question – on how the room was used and decorated. The house was very much Washington’s creation. He was involved in the daintiest questions of décor, even when he was away on military campaigns. It was strangely pleasing to imagine him at Valley Forge, with his troops dropping dead of cold and hunger, agonizing over the purchase of lace ruffs and tea cosies. What a great guy. What a hero.
Chapter twelve
I SPENT THE night on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Washington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities in America before air-conditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it – wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans. Even at night there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze, but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I can remember lying awake in a hotel in downtown Washington listening to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns, the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling, people being shot.
We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4–3 at Griffith Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the blood that was draining out of the hole in his head. My parents hustled us past and told us not to look, but we did, of course. Things like that didn’t happen in Des Moines, so we gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programmes like Gunsmoke and Dragnet. I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed such a strange thing to do, to stop someone’s life just because you found him in some way disagreeable. I imagined my fourth grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had