Mystery

One arrived at business appointments five minutes late, and half an hour late for social functions. One played tennis, polo, and golf as well as possible. One drank whiskey, gin, beer, and champagne—one did not really know much about other wines—and wore wool in the winter, cotton in summer. (Only certain brands and labels were acceptable, all others being either comically inappropriate or more or less invisible.) One smiled and told the latest jokes; one never publicly disapproved of anything, ever, nor too enthusiastically gave public approval, ever. One made money (or in the Redwings’ case, conserved it) but did not vulgarly discuss it. One owned art, but did not attach an unseemly importance to it: paintings, chiefly landscapes or portraits, were intended to decorate walls, increase in value, and testify to the splendor of their owners. (When the Redwings and members of their circle decided to donate their “art” to Mill Walk’s Museo del Kunst, they generally stipulated that the Museo construct facsimiles of their living rooms, so that the paintings could be seen in their proper context.) Similarly, novels told stories designed to be the summer entertainment of women; poetry was either prettily rhymed stuff for children or absurdly obscure and self-important; and “classical” music obligingly provided a set of familiar melodies as a background for being seen in public in one’s best clothes. One ignored as far as was possible any distasteful, uncomfortable, or irritating realities. One spent the summers in Europe, buying things, at South American resorts, buying other things, or “up north,” ideally at Eagle Lake, drinking, fishing, organizing lavish parties, and committing adultery. One spoke no foreign language, the idea was ridiculous, but a faulty and rudimentary knowledge of German, if assimilated at the knee of a grandparent who had once owned a great deal of eastern shore property and made a very good thing of it, was acceptable. One attended Brooks-Lowood and played in as many sports as possible, ignored and ridiculed the unattractive and unpopular, despised the poor and the natives, thought of any other part of the Western Hemisphere except Eagle Lake and its environs as unfortunate in exact relation to its dissimilarity to Mill Walk, went away to college to be polished but not corrupted by exposure to interesting but irrelevant points of view, and returned to marry and propagate oneself, to consolidate or create wealth. One never really looked worried, and one never said anything that had not been heard being said before. One belonged to the Mill Walk Founders Club, the Beach & Yacht Club, one or both of two country clubs, the alumni club of one’s college, the Episcopal Church, and in the case of young businessmen, the Kiwanis Club, so as not to appear snobbish.

Generally, one was taller than average, blond, blue-eyed. Generally one had perfect teeth. (The Redwings themselves, however, tended to be short, dark, and rather heavyset, and to have wide spaces between their teeth.)

One branch of the Redwing family attempted to install fox hunting—“riding to hounds”—as a regular part of island life, but due to the absence of native foxes and the unfailing ability of the native cats and ferrets to evade the panting, heat-stricken imported hounds, the custom swiftly degenerated to regular annual participation at the Hunt Ball, with the local males dressed in black boots and pink hacking jackets. As the nature of this attempt at an instant tradition might indicate, Mill Walk society was reflexively Anglophile in its tastes, drawn to chintz and floral patterns, conservative clothing, leather furniture, wood paneling, small dogs, formal dinners, the consumption of game birds, “eloquent” portraits of family pets, indifference to intellectual matters, cheerful philistinism, habitual assumption of moral superiority, and the like. Also Anglophile, perhaps, was the assumption that the civilized world—the world that mattered—by no means included all of Mill Walk, but only the far east end where the Redwings, their relatives, friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on lived, and, though this was debatable, Elm Cove, which lay to the western end of Glen Hollow Golf Club. Other outposts of the civilized world were: Bermuda, Mustique, Charleston, particular sections of Brazil and Venezuela—especially “Tranquility,” the Redwing hideaway there—certain areas of Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and London, Eagle Lake, the Scottish highlands, and the Redwing hunting lodge in Alaska. One might go anywhere in the world, certainly, but there was surely no real need to go anywhere but to these places, which between them made up the map of all that was desirable to a right-minded person.

To a reliable person, one could say.