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to Dorothy. “I hope y’all can stay for some nice roast beef,” she says, returning to her chair. Then she whispers, “Please compliment Dorothy on the food. She isn’t the cook that Hattie Mae was, but she tries.”
    “I could use Dorothy at my house,” says Lennie. “I could use two Dorothys.”
    Lila gives a slight smile and nod of her head. “The dinner parties that Daddy and Mother gave! You remember, Lennie. Hattie Mae was a marvel, wasn’t she? She’d get her sister Pauline to help. For three days before the party, they’d be ironing the table linens and polishing the silverware, polishing every piece of metal that could shine. They polished the brass on the chandeliers and the brass doorknobs and the brass candlesticks and even the brass light switch plates. Then, they’d be in the kitchen for two days baking pie shells and buttermilk biscuits. The day of the party, Hattie Mae and Pauline would get to the house about eight a.m. and cook for ten hours straight. Absolutely scrumptious smells went from one end of the place to the other. At three o’clock, the flowers would arrive. Roses and stargazer lilies. Mother put flowers in every room of the house. At five o’clock, Hoke, Mrs. Twaddle’s chauffeur, would show up wearing a suit and set up the bar right here in the sun room. He put a white tablecloth over one of Daddy’s card tables and brought colored toothpicks for the martini olives. Hattie Mae and Pauline were a marvel. An absolute marvel. For hors d’oeuvres, they served crab dip with flaky biscuits and little pieces of steak on crackers with a tip of an asparagus and a dollop of hollandaise sauce. Then there would be French onion soup, beautiful roast beef, potatoes au gratin, cream spinach with oysters. They got that recipe from somewhere in New Orleans. For dessert they served pecan pie and cherries jubilee. Some of the men got so stuffed they had to go upstairs and lie down in the bedrooms. You’d see shoes in the hallway. The women would say to Mother, ‘What a lovely party, Celia, you’ve outdone yourself.’ Then they’d sneakinto the kitchen and corner Hattie Mae and try to sweet-talk her into giving out her recipes. But Hattie Mae wouldn’t oblige. Hattie Mae was independent minded, but she had a loyalty to Mother.”
    “You’re killing me,” says Abi from the living room.
    “Too much swishin’ of the dishes for my blood,” says Lennie.
    A piece of some toy skitters across the slick marble floor and a toddler chases after it, while my cousin Stephen, who now runs the family business, comments on the lineup of films for the summer. “Nothing great,” says another cousin. “People don’t care if it’s great, they just want escape,” says Jake, a red-faced cousin who keeps a fifty-foot yacht in Florida. “Scott finished number one tennis player in his age group,” says Nancy, another cousin. “Don’t be modest,” says Jake. Nancy makes a face while Jake puts his arm around her.
    I look at Nancy and Jake, see them as children when we played together in the leaf pile.
    What is this cord? And me, rarely home for the last forty years, now gathered with my family in this old house, a flickering dream I keep repeating.
    Bereft Aunt Rosalie walks in with red, swollen eyes. For a moment, she stands in the doorway, tall and ethereal and faint, like a woman in one of Thomas Dewing’s paintings. Then she sits down next to Lennie, who gives her a kiss. The room becomes silent. Despite her grief, Rosalie has managed to order thank-you cards, to be engraved on beige paper just like the ones her mother, Helen, made in Birmingham twenty-five years ago, just like the ones Helen’s mother, Bess, made in Atlanta twenty-five years before that. Uncle Ed’s widow rocks back and forth in her chair, back and forth, and finally says, “He was only a boy when I met him.”

Kentucky Lake
    The principal vacation destination for our family during the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kentucky