He was more comfortable out here than he had been inside. The gathering dusk enveloped him, and all he had to do was eat and drink and listen, catching one thread of conversation over here, another over there. Scott sat at the head of the table, beside a pretty blonde who must have been his wife—the little cunt. Most of the talk was impenetrable to him, about people and places and events he had no connection or access to, but some of it excited him: talk of art and gallery openings, of bebop records and clubs in Harlem, of cases before the Supreme Court, which some of the crowd seemed to know intimately, of the integration of the schools—vis-à-vis the tensions in Little Rock—which everyone seemed to support without question. It was thrilling to think of what Uncle Carswall or his mother would have said to all this, how disgusted they would be with these people, and Henry found himself nodding eagerly about opinions he’d never spent much time thinking about one way or another. The gumbo was delicious, rice and potatoes and sausage, a good bit of spice in it too, and he was pretty sure there were cashews in it, if that was possible, and crunchy disks of some kind of root vegetable—he didn’t care, he was shoveling it in. He said this to Effie: “Boy, I’m just shoveling this in! It’s outstanding, isn’t it?” But she only gave him a generic nod, distracted by someone on the other side of her, and that was all right, he had finished his third gin and tonic and had poured himself some wine, and he was feeling thoroughly, pleasantly drunk. Effie was too, he could tell: she had become chatty. The woman she was talking to, who appeared to be Mexican or Arabian or maybe just Jewish, was continuing the conversation about the integration of the schools, soliciting Effie’s opinion as if she were an eyewitness in a war: “But do you see much trouble where you are?” she asked, and Effie said, “Oh, no, no, no, not one bit, really, that’s just stuff in the news—I mean it’s there, you know, it’s obviously an issue, you understand, but it’s not the day-to-day, or rather, we live the day-to-day, so it’s quite different…” It might have been the alcohol changing her, or affecting his own ears, but Effie’s voice didn’t sound like her own: she sounded faintly aristocratic, a little like Clara imitating Scarlett O’Hara. She described how close her family was to her cook’s family, how they exchanged gifts at Christmastime; she explained how her father was the mayor of the town where they lived (this impressed the woman very much), how he owned a farm-supply store too, and gave money to charity. It was strange to hear Effie talk about Signal Creek to someone who knew nothing about it, and for a moment he felt a powerful kinship to her, of a sort he would never have felt back home. When the woman, seeing Henry listening in, asked about his family, Effie spoke for him, calling Uncle Carswall’s property an “estate” and saying he had nearly a thousand acres of land. She wasn’t lying, exactly, but it gave the impression that he lived on a big antebellum plantation instead of the plain old ugly country outside of Signal Creek. He didn’t mind, though. He could play the part. “How lovely it must be!” the woman said, and Henry cleared his voice and said it was, it was indeed.