Chapter 37
Mary Simpson chattered gaily all the way home, not even complaining once about the wretched conditions of the half-cobblestoned streets and the way their vehicle was lurching about. They were riding in what amounted to a palanquin suspended fore-and-aft between two horses, with a rider on the lead horse. That was a far more practical conveyance for a city with such rough streets as Magdeburg’s still were than an actual carriage would have been. Still, the ride was very far from a smooth one.
Simpson was glad to hear the undertone of happiness in his wife’s voice, but paid little attention to her actual words. Her monologue was mostly meaningless to him, anyway, involving Mary’s detailed—even exhaustive—assessment of the various personalities she’d encountered at Hesse-Kassel’s soiree. As opaque as his own shop talk would have been to her.
It was a practiced and polite sort of ignoring, on his part. He’d had plenty of experience, in the long years before the Ring of Fire, accompanying Mary to a multitude of social occasions. He’d always tried to get out of as many as he could, except during his stint at the Pentagon, but Mary ran a tight ship and didn’t let him slip too often. She’d even forced him to attend more operas than he could remember, a form of entertainment he found positively excruciating.
But . . . he’d never complained, either. Simpson was honest enough to admit, even to himself, that his impressive career in the Navy had been helped along considerably by Mary’s talents and discipline. She’d been the perfect “Navy wife,” just as, in later years, she’d given him more influence in the social circles that mattered than he’d ever have been able to get simply from his status as the head of a sizeable industrial firm. Without Mary, John Chandler Simpson would have been a powerful and respected man, of course. But no newspaper or magazine would ever have bestowed upon him—as one of them once had—the title of “Mr. Pittsburgh.” The title had been given out in a gingerly manner, to be sure. There would always be too much of the ruthless corporate shark about John Simpson to make people completely comfortable around him, even those as wealthy and powerful as he had been.
There’d been no such reservations, on the other hand, about the title which many magazines and newspapers had bestowed upon Mary. “The Dame of the Three Rivers” was a phrase you could have found, on any given day of the week, in the society columns of western Pennsylvania’s periodicals. She’d been on the board of directors or otherwise highly connected with practically all of the Carnegie establishments in Pittsburgh, ranging from museums to Carnegie-Mellon University; and the same for at least half of the city’s major artistic and musical foundations. Whenever someone wanted to tap into philanthropical circles in Pittsburgh, they eventually wound up knocking on the door of Mrs. John Chandler Simpson—and those of them already in the know started there in the first place. With a quick phone call, followed by lunch at any one of Mary’s favorite restaurants.
Her enthusiasms had cost him money, to be sure, and now and then he’d grumbled about it. But not too loud, and not too often. Partly, because money hadn’t been everything to John Simpson, despite what people assumed. Mostly, though, because he was more than sophisticated enough to understand that what goes around, comes around. He was certain that at least one big contract he’d landed—balanced on a knife edge between him and a competitor—had come his way because the prospective customer, on a visit, turned out to share Mary’s enthusiasm for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. The customer’s wife—no accounting for taste—had even shared Mary’s fondness for Renaissance music.
By an odd coincidence, no sooner had they entered the house which he’d rented next to the shipyard and lit the lamps than his drifting thoughts intersected Mary’s full-bore monologue.
“—still alive. God, John, think of it! Monteverdi himself. Of course, he’s getting on in years—must be somewhere in his sixties by now—but if I remember right he lived to a ripe old age. Even down there in Italy, where they always have such terrible epidemics. And the landgravine of Hesse-Kassel—that’s Amalie—was telling me that she heard from her cousin Luise that although Monteverdi took holy orders after that horrible sack of Mantua and he moved to Venice—”