Lancelot

sir.” He relaxed: it is something to do with the house, he thinks, and the tourists.
    The hiding hole was part of Elgin’s spiel to the tourists. That summer Elgin and his sister Doreen took turns leading the tourists through the house. They tell them the usual stuff—that though Belle Isle is indeed a small island now, surrounded by Ethyl pipery, in 1859 it had 3,500 arpents of land, harvested 2,000 hogsheads of sugar, had its own race track and fifty racing horses in the stable.
    â€”that—and this is the sort of thing Peoria housewives oh and ah at: the marble mantelpiece was delivered from Carrara accompanied by two marble cutters, a right-handed one and a left-handed one, so they could carve the fresh-cut marble at the same time before the marble “hardened” (something marble does).
    â€”that the solid silver hardware of the doors, locks, hinges, keyholes, taken for steel by the Yankee soldiers, no, not even taken, the metal not even considered, for what Yankee or for that matter who else in the world but Louis XIV would think of a sterling-silver door hinge?
    â€”that all the rest, brick, column flutings, wavy window glass, woodwork, even iron cookery was made by slave artisans on the place.
    â€”that finally, the most important to my plan, the hiding hole, no more than a warming oven let into the brick next to the fireplace but actually used as a hiding hole one day when nineteen-year-old Private Clayton Laughlin Lamar home on leave in 1862 hid from a Yankee patrol. This compartment, at any rate, was discovered to run the length of the chimney on both sides for three stories and so was fitted out later by an enterprising Lamar as a dumbwaiter to raise warm food to ailing Aunt Clarisse confined twenty years to a second-story bedroom for complaints real and imaginary, the same bedroom shared until recently by Margot and me and slept in now by her alone. Or did she sleep alone?
    Elgin’s father, Ellis Buell, and I used to play in the dumbwaiter, letting each other up and down from living room to bedroom to attic. If there is something about a concealed hole in the wall which fascinates Ohio tourists, there is something about traveling in it from one room to another by a magic and unprovided route which astounds children. Children believe that a wall is a wall, that the word says what is and what is not, and that if there is something else there the word doesn’t say, reality itself is tricked and a new magic and unnamed world opens.
    â€œDoes that dumbwaiter still work?”
    â€œThat old rope rotten.” Elgin was excited. Not excited. Mystified. What am I up to? What he gon do next? He doesn’t know, but he’ll go along.
    Late supper as usual. Margot, Merlin, Dana, Raine, and my daughter Lucy. Tex Reilly, Margot’s father, and Siobhan up on the third floor watching Mannix. A happy arrangement for all concerned because it got Tex and Siobhan out of the way without banishing them. Tex made his money by inventing a new kind of drilling “mud” but Margot thought he wouldn’t fit in with this company. She was ashamed of him. The other night they were blasting Hollywood as usual and the grossness of Hollywood types like Chill Wills. Fair enough. Chill may indeed be gross. The trouble is, Tex looks and talks a lot like Chill Wills.
    It was after nine. Nothing was changed, except me. My “discovery” changed everything. I’ve become watchful, like a man who hears a footstep behind him. And sober. For some reason or other, since my “discovery” at 5:01 p.m., more than four hours ago, it had not been necessary to drink.
    Merlin as usual went out of his way to be nice to me. He liked me and I him. His charm was genuine. He deferred to me as his local expert on the Southern upper class and asked good questions: “Was there much socializing between the English plantation society on this side of the river and the French-Catholic on the other?” (Yes, there was. They’d row back and forth across the river and dance all night.) His ear was sharp: “I notice people here, not necessarily the lower classes, saying something like: ‘Why you do me that?’ instead of ‘Why do you do that to me?’ Is that Black, French, or Anglo-Saxon?” (I didn’t know.)
    His blue gaze engaged me with a lively intimacy, establishing a bond between us and excluding the others. Somehow his offense against me was also