their carefully negligent, proletariat wardrobes. Mary Byrd’s dad joined him in the business. There wasn’t exactly a fortune, but the D’Abruzzis became firmly and proudly middle-class, moving from Oregon Hill to the West End, acquiring a summer cottage on the Chesapeake, and sending Mary Byrd, the first grandchild, to William and Mary and her brothers, Nick and James, to the University of Richmond. Her D’Abruzzi grandparents had died—her grandfather of something in his brain, maybe the French disease, or maybe tanning chemicals; Mary Byrd hardly remembered them—and her parents had had their marriage annulled and both had remarried when she was just a kid. She rarely saw or heard from her father; not, she chose to think, because he didn’t care, but because he was so busy with his new family and new life in New Jersey, where he’d relocated the business. It was just coincidence that she and Charles shared the name Byrd. Or almost. Mary Byrd’s mother thought that the association with a First Families of Virginia name, and a double name at that, sounded uptown, and heritage-y, and perhaps would give her daughter an advantage in life. Perhaps.
Mary Byrd had met Charles and Mann at a fund-raiser for the Valentine Museum in Richmond, where she had a part-time curatorship. Charles was learning about photography and the gallery business, coming out of his bad, short first marriage, and Mann was trying to come out of his closet. She was charmed by them both. She and Charles married two years later and they all settled back in Mississippi, Mary Byrd and Mann connected by their outsiderness and secretive natures, Charles and Mann connected by their prep school boyhood, and who knew what else, and all of them connected to the Virginia Tidewater.
Welcomed graciously into the Thornton clan, Mary Byrd tried to adjust quickly, striving to become more WASP than wop. More stoic, more civil, more reserved, less self-focused. More Melanie than Scarlett. Raised to disdain temperamental outbursts, Charles could ignore yelling, door-slamming, and, years ago now, tears. In fact, on the occasions that Mary Byrd had employed crying to get Charles’s attention, it had backfired, and Charles had clammed up and withdrawn. Emotions, particularly the unhappy ones, in his view were somewhat tacky. Charles had grown up with his family’s disbelief in headaches, naps, or psychiatric help; god forbid one would talk to—pay money to talk to!—strangers about private matters. Self-indulgence, drinking excepted, was not good, either. And so, from the Thorntons Mary Byrd had learned to live more serenely, not think so much about herself, and to drink seriously. She believed it was a more civilized day-to-day existence. Gin and tonic in the insane hell of a Mississippi summer, bourbon or martinis in the damp, bone-chilling winters. Wine was nice but just more of a pleasant accompaniment to a meal, and plain old beer was more suitable to most Southern cooking. In Charles’s family neither wine nor beer constituted drinking anyway, and were actually more of a pain in the ass to procure: the peculiar liquor laws in the town permitted buying and consuming gallons of hard liquor but not even one single can of cold beer. Go figure.
So Mary Byrd had settled in to the sort of nineteenth-century, Deep South way of her husband’s people. And she had to admit that a little of her Italianness had rubbed off on Charles. It didn’t happen often, but when he found himself with her family, he learned not to be alarmed at the aggressiveness and hyperbole that was part of their DNA: they weren’t really angry all the time and didn’t really want to kill each other, and food was to them what booze was to the Thorntons: civilization. Charles loved the succulent peasant dishes that Mary Byrd cooked; perhaps his biggest concession to her messy, Mediterranean soap-opera upbringing.
Mary Byrd dialed Mann again. It rang a long time; she wouldn’t blame him
Mary Byrd had met Charles and Mann at a fund-raiser for the Valentine Museum in Richmond, where she had a part-time curatorship. Charles was learning about photography and the gallery business, coming out of his bad, short first marriage, and Mann was trying to come out of his closet. She was charmed by them both. She and Charles married two years later and they all settled back in Mississippi, Mary Byrd and Mann connected by their outsiderness and secretive natures, Charles and Mann connected by their prep school boyhood, and who knew what else, and all of them connected to the Virginia Tidewater.
Welcomed graciously into the Thornton clan, Mary Byrd tried to adjust quickly, striving to become more WASP than wop. More stoic, more civil, more reserved, less self-focused. More Melanie than Scarlett. Raised to disdain temperamental outbursts, Charles could ignore yelling, door-slamming, and, years ago now, tears. In fact, on the occasions that Mary Byrd had employed crying to get Charles’s attention, it had backfired, and Charles had clammed up and withdrawn. Emotions, particularly the unhappy ones, in his view were somewhat tacky. Charles had grown up with his family’s disbelief in headaches, naps, or psychiatric help; god forbid one would talk to—pay money to talk to!—strangers about private matters. Self-indulgence, drinking excepted, was not good, either. And so, from the Thorntons Mary Byrd had learned to live more serenely, not think so much about herself, and to drink seriously. She believed it was a more civilized day-to-day existence. Gin and tonic in the insane hell of a Mississippi summer, bourbon or martinis in the damp, bone-chilling winters. Wine was nice but just more of a pleasant accompaniment to a meal, and plain old beer was more suitable to most Southern cooking. In Charles’s family neither wine nor beer constituted drinking anyway, and were actually more of a pain in the ass to procure: the peculiar liquor laws in the town permitted buying and consuming gallons of hard liquor but not even one single can of cold beer. Go figure.
So Mary Byrd had settled in to the sort of nineteenth-century, Deep South way of her husband’s people. And she had to admit that a little of her Italianness had rubbed off on Charles. It didn’t happen often, but when he found himself with her family, he learned not to be alarmed at the aggressiveness and hyperbole that was part of their DNA: they weren’t really angry all the time and didn’t really want to kill each other, and food was to them what booze was to the Thorntons: civilization. Charles loved the succulent peasant dishes that Mary Byrd cooked; perhaps his biggest concession to her messy, Mediterranean soap-opera upbringing.
Mary Byrd dialed Mann again. It rang a long time; she wouldn’t blame him
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