O Canada!

The kids and I have said our rosary and we're heading out to vote. Our country will not automatically fall or rise based on who concedes tonight (though I'm not as sanguine about the stock market), but for those who take a more desperate view, The Bundle has a handy set of instructions on How To Move To Canada If Your Candidate Doesn't Win The Election.

Everything I know about living in Canada comes from Anne of Green Gablesand Mrs. Mike, so my only advice to those who must go north is: don't forget to pack the snow boots and the ipecac syrup.

Final Pre-Election Thoughts

I've got an early morning meeting tomorrow, so I'll be standing outside my polling place when it opens at 6:30AM in order to be sure of getting my vote in before heading off to work. The way things have fallen out, it's rather gratifying to be an Ohio voter this year.

All indications suggest this will be one of the closer elections of recent history, though such indications can, of course, be wrong. In 2000 the election proved to be far closer than it was expected to be. This year it could be less close than expected. My bet, however, is that it will be close. I would be surprised if either candidate broke 300 electoral votes or 51% of the popular vote. Obama has a lousy economy and has run a relentlessly negative campaign with little forward looking vision. Romney has had a good closing month, but before that he ran an utterly hapless campaign throughout the summer and thus found himself having to dig out of a significant hole when he finally managed to introduce himself to the electorate at the debates.

Although the polling does not look as good for Romney as it did a week ago, I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction that he will squeak out the narrowest of wins. That may be wishful thinking on my part, but with a number of national polls still showing a toss up but higher enthusiasm in the GOP, and with early voting tallies suggesting that the Democrats may not have racked up enough pre-election day votes to beat the invariably higher Republican election day turnout in key battleground states, I think it remains possible.

I'm sure that a President Romney will frequently disappoint or upset me, but it seems quite clear to me that he would be a better choice than Obama on a host of issues. I hope he prevails.

Stillwater - 4

Already with the late nights. 6,746/50,000.

***

Esther parked behind the house in the staff lot. Melly had often seen the back of Stillwater from the Arceneauxs’ cottage, and now she numbered the familiar windows and doors, wondering if one of these would lead to her room. Esther pulled Melly’s walker from the trun, stacked the boxes precariously atop the packed laundry basket, and led the way to the elevator in the southeast basement, near the old kitchens.

“This is part of our handicapped access,” she said. “We had to take out the servants’ staircase to put it in, and getting the permits was a nightmare. It goes all the way to the second floor, not that you’ll need to go up that far.”

The elevator stopped in a back hall on the first floor.

“Over here are the new kitchens and Mr Spencer’s office,” said Esther, jerking her head to the left. “You shouldn’t disturb him unless it’s an emergency, but then, he travels a good deal. No, that door goes to the dining room. We won’t go through that way right now; you’ll see it tonight. Let’s go down the gallery; it runs outside the dining room to the stairs hall. To the left of the stairs is the library wing, and your room is just behind that.”

Melly, tired and confused, pushed heavily on her walker as she slogged behind Esther. Despite her love of the Stillwater property and the unique aesthetics of the exterior, she had never been inside the house itself, and the joy of anticipation had dissolved in the wearing reality of wending her way through the maze of corridors. The matted gallery down which she now passed was a long enclosed porch bounded on one side by the deep-sashed, high-linteled windows of the dining room and on the other by windows so wide they seemed to be multipaned walls of glass which overlooked the cottages and the fields. Melly paused for moment to allow the interior aspect to conform to her memory of the four large exterior windows above the basement. What was next? The wide door at the end of the gallery opened into the stairs hall which had no windows or doors to the back. She leaned against a fluted white column on her right and tried to orient herself. As Esther set the basket on the stairs to readjust her grip, Melly peeped past the column, one of a pair that framed the rear of the grand hall, to catch her first glimpse of the glamor of Stillwater. 

Along the grand central corridor, vast white doors, some hinged, some pocketed, stood temptingly ajar to reveal stripes of sunlight and shadow against ivory pilastered walls. Streaming into the hall itself, the sunlight caught and tangled in the high pendants of the chandeliers, sparkling from the delicate plaster of the moldings and studding the heavy elegant paper of the walls with prismatic stars which tumbled down to dance in the patina of the floorboards and drown in the rich plush of the carpets. Further down the hall, a second set of columns, a larger carpet, a more heavily crystallized chandelier exalted the entrance hall. There, more forty feet opposite Melly, the silver knob of the massive front door gleamed temptingly in its setting of deep wood. She edged around the column and stepped into the hall…

“Come on, Melly!” Esther’s crisp voice broke through the hazy spell of the mote-speckled passage. “You’ll have time enough to see the front rooms. I’ll take you on the tour if you want.” 

Melly turned back toward the spiral staircase. The sinuous honeyed wood of the bannister and treads were bathed in rectangles of red and blue light pouring through a window set halfway up the stairs. A longing seized her to press her nose to the colored glass and look out over the rose-tinted grounds, but the thought of the climbing the steep spiral made her body ache. Esther waited a bit impatiently as Melly passed reluctantly away from the light and the double doors beneath the stairs. She knew these from the outside too, on the west side of the house — she could see the curved wall with a wrought-iron balcony between the west wing and the south wing, with the stained glass window directly above the French doors. 

Two more doors, less ornate than the others but still with molding piled high, stood against the far wall of the stair hall, the right one nestled temptingly under the high plastered undercurve of the stairs, but Esther opened the left onto yet another hall.  Melly looked in to see a plain service passage. Bare wood floor, two tall transomed doors on the left, a plain paneled one at the end, and a screened exterior door to the right opening to steps down to the yard. Melly knew that staircase; this wing stood at a right angle from the great windows of the dining room gallery.

The door at the end of the hall was the bathroom door; the last door on the left was Melly’s room. The old plaster gave evidence of the room being in long disuse,  but it was spacious and well-lit, furnished with disparate array of oddments from the attics. Two large arched windows opposite the door cast the afternoon sun across the carpets and bed. Yet another door suggested a passage to the other room in the hall. A small window tucked between the wall and the fireplace looked across the sugarcane fields. Melly knew that window from outside. She closed her eyes and envisioned the house from the back, finding the chimney flanked by only one window, at the back of the south wing serviced by the exterior stairs she’d seen in the hall.

“Well, here you are!” Esther thumped Melly’s belongings on the floor. “Mr and Mrs Spencer usually eat dinner in the kitchen, but they wanted to welcome you tonight with a formal meal in the dining room. I know you’re tired, so you rest up now and I’ll come and fetch you when it’s time to eat.”

At the thought of company dinner in the formal dining room, Melly’s weariness returned to her. She sat on the bed and nudged her walker slightly away with her toe. Esther looked at her watch and stepped to the door. 

“Do you have any questions?” she asked, hand on the knob.

To her surprise, Melly heard herself asking, “How many doors are in this house?”

Esther hesitated. “Well, there are… there must be…” She calculated for a moment, and then slipped into the confident patter of a tour guide improvising. “Well, there are seventy-five rooms in the house, but some of them have no doors, and some have more than one. The library here,” indicating the door to the other room, “has four doors, one opening here, one in the hall, one in the stair hall, and one to the balcony. Most of the doors have the silver knobs; look, yours does.”

The tarnished knob glinted as Esther closed the door. Melly lay in bed and stared at the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling medallion, glad to be in a remote corner of the house far from the press of seventy-four surrounding rooms. The sound of fading footsteps in the hall was a new sensation for Melly — imagine a house where people walked normally down a hall instead of charging like elephants, and a house so quiet that you could hear those steps die away! She turned her head to ponder the door that lead to the library. She could go through that door into the library and come out the door under the stairs. Did anyone use the library? Would she be allowed to pass through it?

“If this were my house,” she told the library door, “I’d never walk in the back halls. I’d go right through the middle of the big rooms and dance in the sunbeams.”

***

For those members of the party inclined to find new social interactions burdensome, the dinner in the big dining room was an awkward affair. Melly, already seated at the big table with Esther, struggled to her feet as Mr and Mrs Spencer entered the room.

“No, don’t stand up on our account,” ordered Richard, who hated to see the girl overexert herself, and Melly, quashed, obeyed. Her dejected attitude touched Richard — she had only been trying to be polite, of course; there had been no need to crush the girl right off. He gave her a formal handshake, a gesture from which they both naturally shrank, and being a man who loathed talking down to children, spoke such grave words of welcome that she was uncertain whether she should be ashamed of being such a burden to him or of being so ungrateful so immediately.

Cheryl Spencer sat herself next to Melly and squeezed her hand as the plates were set before them.

“Honey, you look all worn out. You’d better eat something. It’s that trip from Baton Rouge. I hate riding all that way — Lord, the dogs bark the whole time. Pugsy hates the car, don’t you, baby?”

Pugsy paced through his appointed turns and settled comfortably in Cheryl’s lap. He raised his wrinkled face to Melly and gave her a civil snuff, and she managed a small smile in return.

“Look at that! He likes you already. Pugsy has a sixth sense about people — he just knows who he likes. Here, give him a bite to eat and see what he does.”

Melly took the piece of biscuit Mrs Spencer handed her and timidly offered it to the dog. He snuffed again and solemly licked it from her fingers. Melly smiled again and scratched the small ugly head. Mrs Spencer uttered shrill cries of delight at how instantly Pugsy had taken to Melly and foretold great friendship. Melly was going to have to come outside sometime and have a good romp with the dogs; nothing could be more healthy.

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs Spencer,” said Esther in the pointed way adults so often use when trying to emphasize modes of address in front of youngsters, “but Melly’s not quite ready to run around with the dogs just yet. The first thing is to get her rested up.”

“Yes,” said Mr Spencer, nodding to Melly. “Are you settling in well? How do you like your room?”

“Oh, it’s so nice, sir,” Melly replied softly. “It’s big and quiet, and the bed is soft.”

“I hope you won’t have to spend too long laying in bed. Do you like to read?”

“Yes, sir. That is, I don’t read too fast, sir, but I’m sure I’ll find something to read in the library, if I’m allowed.”

“Of course. Someone will run you across books every day if you like.”

“I don’t mind getting them myself.”

“But you’ll wear yourself out walking from the cottage.”

“Oh no, sir,” said Melly, not understanding him. “Miss Davis said it was only in the next room. But I didn’t open the door yet to see. I didn’t know if I was allowed.”

There was a brief silence.

“Yes,” Richard said levelly, to Esther, “that room is certainly closer to the library than the cottage is.”

 Esther met his gaze with untroubled eyes.

“Now you surely didn’t expect me to put her up in the cottage, Richard?” 

“The phrase, ‘I’ll take care of everything’ comes to mind.”

“And I have!” Esther protested. “You know my spare room is upstairs, and it would just be cruel to make her walk up all those steps. This house is all set up for easy access, what with the elevator. The only real option was that back room behind the library. I knew no one would mind; it’s been empty for ages.”

“Precisely,” said Richard. “It’s a very old, unimproved room.”

“Goodness, you talk as if it didn’t even have electricity! It’s really quite charming. I’ve made it as comfortable as Melly could want.”

Richard turned back to Melly, who was now quivering with the realization that somehow, her presence was amiss.

“Can you be comfortable there?” he asked her seriously.

“Yes sir,” she whispered. “I like it very much.”

And again he had upset her. “Then you must stay in it, of course. We are happy to have you living with us, Melly. I hope you will ask for anything you need.”

Melly was exhausted, and when dessert was brought in, she begged with brimming eyes to be excused. Esther Davis led her back to her room, satisfied with her day’s work. Richard Spencer watched their slow progress with concern. Cheryl put Pugsy out of her lap, and he toddled along by Melly, keeping pace with her walker.

“What do you think of that?” she asked Richard. “Pugsy’s guiding her back to her room. What a good dog!”

Shut in her room, tucked in her bed, Melly spent that night as she was to spend many more nights, crying herself to sleep. 

Roles and Conflict

I've been reading a lot of Anthony Trollope lately, and thus found myself thinking a fair amount about what the 19th century thought to make a good, or a bad, marriage.

One of the major sources of marital strife in Trollope novels is when the husband or wife is in the habit of interfering in the other's business. After watching this play out between several of his troubled couples, it began to strike me to what an extent Trollope's idea of a happy marriage is rooted in the assumption that the husband and wife have separate spheres. The wife manages the children and the household affairs. The husband manages his profession and the estate. So long as each is happy to leave the other in charge of their domain, there is harmony regardless of how affectionate the couple actually are. And when they do attempt to manage each other's domains, conflict results even among the more affectionate couples.

I don't advocate a strict separation of spheres in marriage. MrsDarwin and I are one of those couples that prefer doing most things together. But it does strike me that having the goal of "50/50 split" in various areas of duty is often problematic, since one so often ends up feeling like one is the one struck doing 55% while the other does only 45%.

To what extent does the modern ideal of men and woman having interchangeable roles in a marriage actually create more conflict by setting the husband and wife up in competition to one another?

Stillwater -- 3

City life seemed to agree with the Arceneauxs. Jean, who tended to fat when not maintaining military discipline, sat on the porch of the shotgun house nursing his aching back, collecting his half pay, and conducting his business with the neighbors, whether amicable or no, in the same bellow with which he addressed endearments and threats to his children. Nanette found work as a seamstress again. Rene flourished at college, and most of the children found that the pace and atmosphere, the smell and the heat and the noise of Baton Rouge suited them fine. Not everyone, however, had uprooted so successfully.

“Richard,” said Esther Davis, striding into that gentleman’s office, “I want to talk to you about Melly Arceneaux.”

The renowned architect who had designed Stillwater for John Spencer in the heady antebellum days had situated the master’s office facing west, with a pair of high arched velvet-draped windows which gazed toward the neighboring plantation to provide a goad for Spencerian ambition. That chamber, a paneled, leather-bound bastion of masculine authority among the elegant front showrooms of the house, had been handed over to Esther Davis for the running of the public side of the plantation: the tours, the madness of maintaining historical designations, and the oversight of the Stillwater Fellowship Ball. Richard Spencer, who feared neither his neighbor’s affluence nor suffered the troubled conscience of the slave owner, preferred to work in the clean simplicity of the housekeeper’s sitting room in the south wing, from whose windows, through a haze of grand oaks, he could overlook his own fields.

He also overlooked Esther's cottage, a far more pleasant prospect that the woman herself.

“Who?” he asked, inclining his head slightly in lieu of lifting his gaze from the business report on the computer.

“Melly Arceneaux. You remember Nanette’s oldest girl?”

Richard did not remember Nanette’s oldest girl. Stifling a sigh, he sat back in his chair, glancing out the window toward the cottages and mentally inventorying the multitudinous black-haired Arceneaux children in an effort to pick out the subject of discussion.

“The quiet one?” he said finally.

“Absolutely!” said Esther, settling herself into Richard’s leather arm chair, blocking his view. “The only quiet one. That girl is sick, Richard. You remember how poorly she was when the Arceneauxs were first here, and how well she could walk by the end. She’s been in Baton Rouge for a year, and it’s killing her. She’s almost too weak to walk, she can’t breathe, the doctors can’t figure out what it is. Maybe it’s MS or lupus or juvenile arthritis.” The unquestionable vigor which made Esther such a competent manager was also evident in her blessed ignorance of the gradations of ill health. “Nanette is at her wits’ end.”

Esther making grand claims on his checkbook was nothing new to Richard Spencer, but the thought of footing hospital bills for a child to whom he had never spoken, in a year when sugar futures were down, was enough to give him pause. He closed the lid of his laptop.

“I grieve for Nanette,” he said. “But what is it you would have me do, Esther? Doesn’t her husband have veteran benefits? What kind of medical expenses do you have in mind?”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that!” Esther was shocked that Richard should think she was making crass financial demands. “She needs to get out the city and come back to Stillwater. She needs fresh air and open space. Nanette thinks it would really be the best thing for her.”

“You want me to put a child of, what? Fourteen? Fifteen?—”

“Fifteen.”

“—In the cottage by herself, for her health?”

Again Esther’s sensibilities were outraged. “Of course not. She needs supervision and some care. Oh, she’s not an invalid, just weak. She’ll be better in no time, and then she could even be useful. Remember how convenient it was to have Nanette here to sew for the girls. Melly can sew too, and it’s just the sort of work that won’t exhaust her.”

Richard raised his eyebrows. “I don’t bring sick children to my property to make them work for me. If she comes, she needs to be treated with the same respect as Sophia or Olivia. Which raises another point. When Melly was last here, she lived with her family. This would be different. She’d be alone. Is it going to be awkward to have her attending the local high school when my own daughters are at private schools? Will she feel left out if she’s not the Queen of the Stillwater Fellowship Ball? I have to draw distinctions, yet I wouldn’t want the girl to be unhappy.”

“No one expects you to raise another daughter!” Esther laughed as if the idea was too absurd even to contemplate. “Now don’t worry about it, Richard. Obviously this is my idea, and I’ll take care of all the arrangements. I won’t ask you to deal with any of the details. I’ve already spoken to Cheryl, and she thinks it’s a lovely plan.”

“Does she?”

“Of course. You know how concerned she is about the Arceneauxs.”

Richard supposed that Esther thought it flattering to attribute to him vast powers of memory and observation. Cheryl was not notably soft-hearted, nor hard-hearted, nor generous, nor stingy, nor prone to concern over any cause besides those which affected her pugs. He sighed, this time audibly.

“You take care of it, then, Esther. By all means bring the girl down if she must come. But talk to her first. Make sure that she understands how life will be here. There’s no point in bringing her here to recuperate if she’s going to be miserable without her family.”

“How could anyone be miserable at Stillwater?” This disingenous question lingered longer than Esther’s retreating form, leaving Richard to meditate on the lot of men who lived at Stillwater with officious sisters-in-law. Perhaps having a sickly child in her cottage would be good for Esther; she certainly needed an object on which to lavish her abundant management skills. 

“Poor girl,” he murmured, gazing southward toward his sugar fields before opening his laptop again.

***

Melly’s health seemed too delicate to let the matter rest, so within two weeks she found herself riding with Esther Davis down the winding road which blindly traced the curves of the Mississippi River behind the thick sloping guideline of the levee. Her worldly belongings, stowed in several flimsy cardboard boxes and laundry baskets, shifted and rustled against her walker in the trunk as Esther careened out of Baton Rouge. The ordeal of leaving her family had been mercifully quick; Esther’s fondness for Nanette’s family did not seem to soften her to Jean’s brash charms, and the chaos of the cramped Arceneaux house had deprived the good-byes of any sentimentality. Mama had kissed and hugged her while yelling at Leonie to stop Marc from teasing the baby. Daddy had said, “Nothing like some high living to make you well again, eh, cher?” and slapped her rump as she crept painfully past his chair on the porch. The boys had yelled their good-byes. They would not miss her. She was never lively, like Leonie, who could shout and run and boss with the best of them. Only Rene would be truly sorry she was gone. He had come over last night and used his college laptop to help her make an email address. He promised, as they sat in the corner of the ratty couch in the living room with their backs to the blaring TV, that he would write her faithfully and tell her the family news and about college. Daddy had joked that he would write to her too, when Mr. Spencer bought him a computer, and Mama had scolded, but Rene put his arm around her and told Daddy that he would buy computers for everyone when he was rich, but Melly wouldn’t have to write to him then because she was going to live with him in peace and quiet. 

The memory of her brother brought tears to her eyes. She turned to the window and stared unseeing at the flat fertile land stretching away from the Mississippi, thick with sugar or suburban enclaves carved out from failed plantations. She wanted to enjoy this drive, to watch the road in anticipation of the great oaks that stood sentinel at the gates of Stillwater. But Miss Esther Davis was talking, talking, always talking about rules and gratitude and the Spencer family. 

“I fixed up a room for you, in the back wing right behind the library — that will be a nice place for you to spend your time until you’re feeling well enough to go back to school. It’s on the ground floor so you won’t have to climb a lot of stairs. Of course we’ve got handicapped access outside; we have to have it for the tours. I give the tour every weekday at 11 AM, so the front rooms are off-limits at that time. In fact, they’re off-limits a good deal of the time. Some of the furniture is more than 150 years old, and the architectural detail is priceless. Naturally, the house is for living in, and the Spencers want you to be comfortable, but I need you to understand how good it is of them to let you live at Stillwater, and how responsible you need to be.” Here Esther laughed. “Thank God it’s you coming and not one of your brothers! We might as well take a bulldozer to the place as let one of them loose in the house.”

Melly shrunk in her seat.

“Running a plantation is a great deal of work, so Mr Spencer isn’t to be bothered by any fuss. Of course Mrs Spencer is an old friend of your mother’s, and she couldn’t be more pleased to have you in the house, but she’s got so much on her hands with her dogs. Do you like dogs? Even if you don’t, you’d best make Mrs Spencer think you do.”

“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t lie.”

Esther glanced in surprise at the small figure huddled in the passenger seat. “Who’s asking you to lie? Don’t tell me that a girl your age doesn’t know how to behave politely when you don’t like something.”

Melly’s lips trembled, but she said, “Yes, ma’am. I do like dogs, ma’am.”

“Well, then, what’s the problem?” Esther shook her head and left Melly to her silent tears.

***

At a certain curve of the Mississippi in Iberville Parish the western bank of the river is lined with numerous small pools, which shelter behind stands of trees from the ceaseless swell and drive of the vaster body of water.  Although the years have pushed the riverbanks upward, the spot is still as recognizable as when John Spencer established his plantation there in 1837, buying almost seven thousand acres of prime sugarcane land. He named his estate Stillwater after the quiet ponds along his three-quarter-mile stretch of waterfront, and set a small army of slaves to the destroying labor of making him prosperous. He spent fourteen years amassing the fortune necessary to build a dwelling worthy of his estate. Finally, spurred on by a running feud with a rival planter three miles upstream, Spencer hired the man’s own architect to build him a house which would at last make his enemy retire in confusion.

He succeeded. Stillwater was a restrained riot of a mansion, a melange of sober Neo-Classical columns and pediments, wooden back porches and stone front pavements, and vertigris iron grillwork balconies under legions of windows. Wings sprouted from three sides in asymmetric confusion. The front of the house, facing north toward the river, was marked by a single marble staircase rising to a two-story porch. Four massive stone pillars, topped with Corinthian capitals carved from single trunks of cypress, soared to support the vast Grecian temple of a roof. Identical pillars graced the west wing in a salute to the upstream rival; a semicircular turret swelled in graceful incongruity from the east. The stairs and library wing extended to the south. A block of kitchen, servants’ quarters, and back staircases was stuck on to the southeast corner of the house. All the disparate elements were unified by a facade of pink stone. The whole edifice floated more than a dozen feet off the ground, rising like the Acropolis over the plateau of the the great arched basements.  

If John Spencer had spared no architectural element for the exterior of his house, he could do no less for the appointment of the interior. Fine Italian artisans had been imported to adorn the walls of the great rooms with bas-relief pillars and complex delicate moldings. The chandeliers, draped with webs of crystal pendants, hung from plaster medallions. Pairs of columns divided the drawing room from the parlor, the front hall from the central hall, the central hall from the stair hall. John Spencer’s rival had bought hand-painted doorknobs for every room of the house; John would install knobs of silver, with keyhole covers to match. Would his rival go to the expense of fifty rooms? John would have seventy-five. The money was of no consequence; if Cotton was King, Sugar was his sweet Queen. The materials cost a small fortune, but the labor was free — John had 150 slaves to build his Gentleman's Seat.

The fantastic grandeur of the place left few unmoved, whether to delight or to horror. It was a world unto itself, outlasting the shame of its construction and the ravages of war and the desperation of drought. Melly Arceneaux had loved it since her first encounter at five years of age, and though she winced at the pain of leaving the comfortable familiarity of her family, she felt as if she were, in some sense, coming home.

Stillwater -- 2

Richard Spencer was called a generous man, and rightly so, for despite an introversion so severe it was often mistaken for severity, he had a kind and open heart. However, it was not this interior disposition which was praised, as few were intimate enough with him to know his gentler qualities. Rather, it was that for the past ten years, the dispersing of Stillwater funds and the planning of the Stillwater Fellowship Ball had been left to the redoubtable energies of Mrs. Spencer’s older sister, Esther Davis, whose charitable impulses were so ambitious that they could only be realized by using someone else’s money. Of course, Esther was a shrewd manager — she had to be; it was public knowledge that she had depended on the Spencers since she had lost most of her life’s savings in the late 90s when her ex-husband had bet, and lost, the farm on the dot-com boom. Although Esther had spent the intervening years in rectifying and then surpassing the original loss, she saw no reason why she should let her own private finances stand in the way of the good that could be achieved with a fortune like the Spencers. They had so much money, it was surely of little consequence to them if Esther used some of it to assist her charity cases. 

The Arceneauxs were one of Esther’s prime charity cases, and on the whole she was pleased with her management of them. Esther and Cheryl had known Nanette Arceneaux’s family for years, and the older Cheryl and the younger Nanette, sharing a particular kind of languid temperament, were as fond of each other as women are when it takes no more energy to maintain a friendship than either feels like expending. In time, Cheryl married up to Stillwater; Nanette married down to Jean Arceneaux, a bad boy from Baton Rouge who had captivated her with his dog tags and sweet words and city ways. The wedding was six months after their first date, the birth of Rene followed six months later, and shortly thereafter Jean’s Marine unit was deployed. Jean was not meant for the dullness of life stateside. His leaves seemed only long enough to get Nanette pregnant again, and Raymond, Andre, Melusine, Marc, and Leonie,  followed in regular succession. Cheryl Spencer kept up, in her easy way, with her old friend, and even went so far as to invite Nanette and her family to visit Stillwater.

“That goddamn Cajun,” Nanette said to Cheryl, as they sat sipping sweet tea and rocking on one of the house’s many back porches. “He say he want to stick out his twenty years and then get out with half-pay, but I tell you what, he going to come home and see all these crazy kids and say, ‘Goddamn, woman, you expect me to live in this madhouse?’” 

“I know, “Cheryl agreed. “Richard is gone so often on his consulting trips to the other American Cane plantations, I really feel like I’m a widow. I just can’t get my kids to leave my poor little dogs alone, and it makes me so mad, sometimes I think I’m going to have get up out of my chair and swat them.”

Esther Davis also sipped sweet tea and surveyed the younger Arceneaux children roughhousing on, around, and under the tablecloths. She wasn’t sure but what she sympathized with Jean.

“Marc!” snapped Nanette, nudging the cloth aside with her knee. “You get off Melusine this instant. Why you want to torment that little girl? Leave her be.”

A tousled preschooler hurled himself out from beneath the tablecloth and charged off across the lawn laughing, easily avoiding his mother’s ineffectual grasp as he dashed toward the football game between the Spencer and Arceneaux boys. On the porch floor, a dark-haired child of perhaps five lay, breathing shallowly. Esther cast a sharp eye over her thin frame and pale face.

“That child is not well,” she said.

“Yeah, we been to the doctors, but they don’t know nothing,” Nanette sighed, settling back in her chair. “They want tests and more tests. They don’t know nothing. Maybe it’s Baton Rouge that’s bad for her. We got to get out of that city, but Jean, he don’t like living out here in the middle of nowhere. Rene! Come pick up Melly.”

A bright-eyed boy, perhaps nine or ten, immediately darted out from the football game. He gently lifted his sister and settled with her in a deep wicker chair. The girl wrapped her arms around his neck. She cast a shy glance at Cheryl Spencer, but when she saw Esther’s intent gaze she squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Rene’s shirt. He patted her gently and whispered soothingly in her ear, and her small frame relaxed in his arms, though she resolutely refused to look up again.

“I think it’s so sweet how they can just sit with each other,” said Cheryl, fanning herself. “Sophia and Olivia would hit their brothers as soon as look at them.” The young Spencer ladies, on the opposite side of the porch ignored their mother with a distain born of long practice and continued to paint their nails with the intensity that can only be mustered by girls of seven and nine.

Esther Davis listened with half an ear as Nanette complained about her work doing alterations at a bridal shop in Baton Rouge. She watched with half an eye as Rene carried Melly to a quiet grassy spot under a large oak where the little girl could chat at her brother away from the gaze of strangers. Here indeed was a project to be managed, if only the details could be worked out. There was the bigger cottage empty, producing no revenue. There was a family to be rescued from pollution of the big city. There was Richard Spencer’s reputation for generosity to be maintained, for left to himself, the man had no idea of how to make a good public effect with his money. There was a seamstress needing better work — here Esther had visions of Sophia, her favorite niece, sweeping down the grand staircase to the Stillwater Fellowship Ball in a fluffy creation designed just for her. The pretty child deserved nothing less.

Esther had her way, of course. The Spencer reputation for generosity was preserved and strengthened (and other inconvenient financial appeals from various worthy causes were firmly put off with reference to Stillwater’s own resident charity family). Cheryl was pleased to see her old friend settled comfortably at Stillwater, provided that she didn’t have put herself to any trouble over the matter, and that the boys would please leave her dogs in peace. Richard Spencer assented, in his distant way, to the arrangement, though he made it clear that this did not mean that the Arceneaux children were to consider themselves free to run all over the big house. The Spencer children, often away at boarding schools, had no interest in socializing with the younger inhabitants of the cottage, though Malcolm Spencer, the second son, was of a more amiable bent of mind than his siblings and made time to tutor Rene, two years his junior. Rene was a most rewarding pupil — he seemed to received the family’s entire share of genius (indeed, Esther Davis observed more than once that his brilliance was in direct proportion to the idiocy of the rest of the children). And so for several years Esther laid the groundwork for her next public-relations coup. The Stillwater Fellowship Ball was of course the highlight of the social year, but of late there had been been a certain staleness to the usual glamor. What a triumph it would be if she could produce the first Stillwater scholar since before World War II! 

Again, Esther’s energy won the day. Richard Spencer deferred to her judgment in the case — the Trust was well-funded, and the boy deserving, and past question has been living on the Stillwater estate. Rene was popular in town, and his elevation to Stillwater Fellow ensured a glow of public admiration for Stillwater’s beneficience. And there was one other unforeseen but highly gratifying effect of the Fellowship: when Jean Arceneaux mustered out of the services a year or two after Rene had gone up to college, he removed his boisterous family to Baton Rouge. Nanette and her children had served their purpose for Stillwater, and hardly anyone was sorry to see them go. Esther Davis gave a final nod and began scrubbing the cottage the moment the much improved Melly carried the baby, Marie-Helene, out the door for the last time. Richard Spencer’s face relaxed as he contemplated the thought of his beautiful plantation once more peaceful and private. The vacancy of the cottage mattered as little as the occupancy to Dick, Sophia, and Olivia Spencer, each busy with college or jobs or impending engagements. Only Cheryl Spencer and Malcolm missed the energy of the young boys and the sight of the quiet Melly in rapt conversation with her adored brother Rene, and as Cheryl was engrossed in her pugs and Malcolm in his studies in the seminary, the Arceneauxs left no more mark on Stillwater than the scratches and scuffs on the wall of the empty cottage.

How Pricing Fairness Can Hurt You

Megan McArdle has a great piece up dealing with one of the things that often bothers people about price discrimination: finding out that other people are consistently paying less than you. Since we live one of the wealthiest and largest countries in the world, and since many of the companies we buy products from do business internationally, this often means that US consumers find out that the products they pay a lot for here in the US are being sold for much less overseas.

Case in point, the US Supreme Court is considering the case of Kirtsaeng v John Wiley and Sons which deals with whether companies can get into the business of buying US-made textbooks overseas and shipping them back to the US. Why would this be advantageous? Textbooks are fairly expensive to produce (as in, to get all the content put together and ready to print) but the cost of producing additional textbooks is low (the cost of printing and binding.) The result is that publishers sell textbooks for far, far more than the cost of printing a book -- that is, far above the marginal cost (the cost of producing one more product.) This isn't because it allows the publishing executives and their investors to lie on beds of gold coin like dragons, publishing companies are not actually massively profitable. It's because the revenue produced by selling the textbooks needs to cover the cost of producing the book content as well as the cost of producing the book itself. So they sell textbooks for what the market will bear, which with something as expensive as college is a heck of a lot.

However, since publishing companies are also constantly on the lookout for more revenue (again, to cover their production costs, as well as to produce profits for their dragons to lie on) after pricing college textbooks in the US at what the US market will bear, they'll go into other countries and sell the same textbooks there for what that country's local market can bear, so that as that price is still above the marginal cost of producing more books. The result: US textbooks can often be bought for much less in other countries. Thus creating the opportunity for some enterprising company to buy the books abroad and ship them back, if only they can get around the legal restrictions thereon. But will that save everyone money? McArdle describes why not:

It is possible for a firm to make money with some of its customers paying less than the average cost (but more than the marginal cost of producing an additional unit). It is not, however, possible for a firm to stay in business with all of its customers paying less than the average cost.

But we want to believe that it is possible. Indeed, no matter how often it is explained that we cannot all be the marginal cost consumer, someone will insist quite loudly that it is possible; that only greedy companies, incompetent bureaucrats, or bad laws stand between us and the joys of marginal cost pricing.

She draws out an example of how this situation would equalize out to the higher price with lower overall unit sales, taking as her example a situation in which ordinary US consumers are the beneficiaries of price discrimination: air travel.

If you're skeptical that this is true, consider an area where you're probably the beneficiary of price discrimination: business travel. The first class and business passengers provide the bulk of the profit on airline tickets; they pay for the extra amenities, and the ability to make last-minute arrangements for short stays during the week. Restricted economy travelers often generate very little revenue over and above the cost of transporting them--but since the seat is a wasting asset, you might as well sell it even if you'll only make a few bucks on it.

Let's say that businesses who travel a lot got a law passed to eliminate this sort of price discrimination, forcing airlines to set a single price for a given route, no matter what date or time the flight was. Such a law might well pass, since people hate confusing airline prices.

The result would not be that everyone got the tourist class price, however. Imagine that you've got 10 business class passengers paying $100 apiece, and 100 tourist class passengers paying $5 apiece. Assume that the marginal cost of taking on an extra business passenger is $2 and the marginal cost of a tourist passenger is $1. Assume your fixed cost of getting the plane off the ground is $1300, so you've got a total cost of $1420 and revenue of $1500.

Now say someone comes along and mandates that everyone has to be charged the same ticket price. What happens? Well, you charge all 110 passengers $13.50 and keep your margins about the same . . .

But wait! The tourist class passengers are very price sensitive. They're on average only willing to pay $5-$8 for a ticket. When you raise the price to $13.50, half drop out. Now you've got 60 passengers, which gives you revenue of $810. But your cost has only dropped by $50. Now you're losing a big hunk of money. You'll have to raise prices. $23 should cover it.

Gee, $23 is more than 4 times what the tourists were paying. They don't want to see Grandma that much. Another half of the tourists drop out. Now you've got 35 passengers. But your costs have only dropped by $25. You'll need to raise prices again. Maybe $40 would cover it?

You can see where this is going; pretty soon almost all you have left is business passengers, paying what they were paying before. In fact, depending on how many tourist class passengers drop out, the business class passengers might end up paying more.

someone has to pay for all those planes, and airline profit margins are far from reliably spectacular (which is why they keep ending up in bankruptcy). No, the tickets for your next vacation would probably cost three or four times as much. Obviously, this is a made-up example, with numbers chosen more for ease of calculation than versimilitude--in the real world, most people would snap up a $38 plane ticket. But empirical research bears this out; ending price discrimination doesn't necessarily mean consumers get a better deal. It can easily mean they get a worse deal.

But there's something deep within us that resists that insight. We hate the feeling that someone else is paying less than us, even if it's not costing us anything. So while a decision for the textbook importer might not make consumers any better off in the pocket, it may make them feel better about the high prices they're paying.