“Did you check the Lafayette Room?” Mrs. Crimm asked her husband. “Sometimes your magnifying glass ends up in there on the Sheraton chest next to the oil lamp. I believe I may have seen it near the two-part mirror the other day, now that I think of it.”
“Why would it end up in the Lafayette Room?” the governor sullenly responded. “We only let other governors and former presidents sleep in there. Someone’s hiding it from me. What is it you don’t want me to see around here?” he demanded as he got up from the spindly old chair.
“You know I never want you to not see anything, dear,” she replied as she led him out of the parlor. “However, I did happen to read that dangerous Trooper Truth this morning. I don’t suppose you’ve seen what he put on his website again?” she added to divert his attention.
“What?” the governor followed her and bumped into a tilt-top tea table in a sitting room, jostling a finger lamp. “Did you print it out?”
“Of course I did,” Mrs. Crimm gravely said. “Since you can’t find your magnifying glass, I’ll have to read it to you. But I fear it will aggravate you, Bedford, and upset your submarine again.”
The governor did not appreciate his wife’s openly discussing his submarine, which was their pet name for his constitution.
“Who’s here?” he asked, squinting about, making sure no one was within earshot.
“Nobody’s here, precious. Just you and me and we’re almost to the breakfast room. There, turn right and watch out for the lithograph. Oops! Here, I’ll straighten it.”
He heard something scrape as she rearranged the lithograph he had just knocked with his large nose.
“I bang my head on that damn thing one more time,” he threatened as he shuffled into the breakfast room and groped for a chair. “What is it of, anyway?”
“William Penn’s treaty with the Indians.” Mrs. Crimm shook out a linen napkin and tucked it into the collar of her husband’s dress shirt, which was buttoned crooked and did not match his paisley suspenders, green velvet vest, or striped necktie.
“This is not Philadelphia and I fail to see why William Penn should be inside the mansion,” the governor said. “Since when did that happen?”
Clearly, he had forgotten his wife’s fleeting passion for lithographs, if he had ever known about it. The governor sighed as Pony materialized with the coffee pot.
“Good morning, sir,” Pony said as he poured.
“No it’s not, Pony. No, indeed. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“It most certainly is, sir,” Pony agreed with a sympathetic nod of the head. “I tell you, I thought the world already went to hell in a handbasket a long time ago, but I was wrong. I sure was. Things is just getting more messed up, that’s right. It’s enough to make a man want to run down to the church and beg God Hisself to please, please help us out of our misery and forgive our sins and our enemies and make people behave. What wrong with folks anyway?
“You know, the other day when them caters showed up for that big dinner of yours?” Pony went on. “I was minding my own business getting them tea and I heard one of ’em say to the other, ‘I wonder if I could take one of these little teacups that’s got the Com’wealth of Virginia on it. What you think?’ ‘I don’t know why not,’ the other one say. ‘You pay tax, don’t you?’ ‘I sure do,’ say the other lady cater. ‘And nothing in here belong to the Crimm family anyhow. It belong to all of us.’ ‘Well, if that isn’t the God’s truth. It belong to us.’
“Then,” Pony went on, getting more animated as his tale wore on, “both them caters stuffed their teacups in them big handbags of theirs, can you believe that?”
“Why on earth … ?” the First Lady sputtered in shock and disgust. “Why didn’t you stop them, for heaven’s sake! I certainly hope they didn’t take the handleless cups and saucers, those lovely pearlware ones with the Leeds floral design.”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” Pony assured her. “It was the ones with handles and the Com’wealth logo on ’em in gold.”