I saw Tad sit down and play brilliant backgammon and then lose on purpose, if that was required. Say there was a resistant elder citizen, some old gal very unlikely to hand over a group of “important” farm-building dependencies; say an incoming mall was already waving bushel baskets of cash at her for that same tract. And here was Tad “throwing” a backgammon game for preservation. “There are many ways to win”—he grew quite snippish when I teased him about this later. I’ve also seen Tad go right up onto the fourth story of a slate roof just after rain, and only say, “Whoo, I gots them Hitchcock Vertigos” after he’d spied whatever mountain goats go up that high to see, and then (like a kitten I once owned) he needed aid and ladders in getting down, almost needed smelling salts. From the ground, a martini was often held aloft and sloshed around for inspiration.

And none of us shall ever forget watching Tad veer into action at Zoning Board meetings statewide. I went to school on how he managed those.

The local boards would know only that some outsider had requested an extra session. Like all of us, the poor things were already “meetinged” to death. Their arms were crossed, their shoes already tapping, their watches exposed for easy consulting. In Tad would sweep, a bit chunky and therefore somewhat more trustworthy. He wore his one dark conservative suit, and was looking fairly neat for a change. No paint on the pair of brown wing tips he called his “M.B.A. drag.” For once he left his pesky dog in the truck. I’d begged him to.

Since his family was an old one (“old and rotten,” he liked to quote William Carlos Williams), he had a sense of other towns and who their leading families were. He’d always arrive at the town hall a bit early. There, he could mill around out front and chat up farmers about crop allotments and outlawed pesticides, he could talk to housewives about the mahimahi being sold at Piggly Wiggly since March and how rare you dared to serve it, and he was not above mentioning his other vice: All My Children. Tad once told me after an especially successful meeting (in which he saved the 1873 Conger-Halsey Academy for Girls outside Rocky Mount), “I swear, Mary Ellen, keeping up with a good soap, it’s the next best thing to being a Mason.”

Meeting was called to order; first thing, he’d get up and say his usual grinning “Hi,” then tell a joke about some boy hick getting the better of a society woman trying to cheat him out of his sainted mother’s pie-safe at a flea market over in Swan Quarter. His accent was one kind of icebreaker, the seeming irreverence another.