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toddy on a silver tray. Toddy! We never drank toddies or juleps as you recall, just bourbon straight or maybe with water, but with Margot it was toddies and juleps. She came from West Texas, where God knows what they drank, but she figured at Belle Isle and for Merlin it was toddies and juleps. No, even before Merlin.
    I sat behind my plantation desk. Elgin sat in the slave chair, made by slaves for slaves. Margot claimed, I guess correctly enough, that the work of some slave artisans had the simplicity and beauty of Shaker furniture.
    â€œElgin,” I said. I had been thinking. “Did you happen to hear what time they got in last night? The reason I ask is I heard somebody, maybe a prowler, around two.”
    Elgin looked at me. “They didn’t come in till after three.”
    He knew who “they” were. After supper, Margot, Merlin, and the rest would usually go back to the Holiday Inn to view rushes from the past week’s shooting. It took a week because the film had to be flown to Burbank for developing. You have to use the same chemical bath, you can’t just drop it off at the local Fotomat. I invited, rather Margot invited, Merlin and Jacoby and Raine and Dana to stay at Belle Isle. They made so much noise coming in late with all their laughter and film talk that I took to sleeping in the corner bedroom. Then Margot suggested that I would sleep better in the pigeonnier. She fixed it up and I moved in, finally staying in the pigeonnier altogether. Even when the film folk moved back to the Holiday Inn, I stayed in the pigeonnier. Why? I looked around. What was I doing living in a pigeon roost?
    â€œElgin, there is something I want you to do.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    Elgin is, was, the only man, woman, or child I would trust completely outside of you, the more credit to him because it’s required of you, isn’t it? (Christ, what are you looking for down there? the girl?)
    â€œIs the house empty?”
    â€œYes, sir. Mama’s done gone home and there were some late tourists. But they’ve gone. At five-thirty I had to ax them to leave.”
    Elgin, age twenty-two, is a well-set-up youth, slim, café-au-lait, and smart—he went to St. Augustine, the elite Black Catholic school in New Orleans, knew more about chemistry than you and I learned in college. Then got a scholarship to M.I.T. He is well-spoken but to save his life he can’t say ask any more than a Japanese can say an r or a German thank you. If he becomes U.S. Senator or wins the Nobel Prize, which he is more apt to do than you or I. he’ll sure as hell say ax in his acceptance speech.
    â€œElgin, there’s something I want you to do for me.”
    â€œYes, sir.” He looked at me. It was then that I realized that for a long time I hadn’t asked him or anybody to do anything, because I hadn’t anything to do.
    â€œYou know the ‘hiding hole’ next to the chimney?”
    â€œYes, 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