What Would Clarence Do?
All new sustainers during our Fall 2016 fundraiser will get a free ebook written by our very own Martha Woodroof! Here's an excerpt of the novella.
What Would Clarence Do?
A hopeful novella by Martha Woodroof offered as a thank-you to WMRA Sustainers
All you can take with you is that which you've given away.
- Pa Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life
Chapter One
“I don’t know,” Edward Blackwell said, staring out the window. “Maybe I’ve had enough.”
“Enough what?” his wife, Jane, asked, looking up from the Style section of the Washington Post. She was not at all alarmed by the fact that Edward might have had enough of something. He had a dreamy, idealistic side that frequently led to fervent pronouncements about relatively minor matters. Strong feelings washed in and out of him as regularly as the tide. She, who was much more practical, liked to look the ups and downs of life right in the eye and see them for what they were; or at least, for what they were as far as she could tell at the moment. Edward had always been full of if onlys when looking at the past and what ifs when looking at the present and future. It came, Jane supposed, from writing novels set in imaginary worlds read by so many people. It would be hard for such a perennially bestselling writer not to get the feeling he could tinker with the fine points of reality.
The two of them were eating breakfast in the small sunroom that they'd added to the back of their home that was at its core mid-eighteenth century. Theirs was one of the land-grant plantations built three hundred years ago on three thousand acres granted by King George to one his helpful buddies. Six hundred and thirty-two acres of the place, known since 1741 as Summerfield, remained intact, a tribute to the respect that the fading southern aristocracy had for its land. The Blackwells were the first people to hold title who were not vague descendants of the original owner. And they did hold title. She and Edward had paid two million six in cash for the property back in the mid-eighties – just before the Charlottesville real estate boom. Heaven and McLean-Faulconer Realty alone could speculate as to what Summerfield might be worth today. History, Edward had remarked many times, was expensive to buy into.
This morning, as usual, Edward was reading. But not, as usual, The New York Times. Instead, the May issue of Vanity Fair lay propped up on the empty toast rack. Jane had caught a peak of a shirtless Rob Lowe on the cover, looking as buff as always. Her husband, however, was not looking at the magazine. Instead, his face was turned toward the windows. “Edward?” Jane said. “You might have had enough of what?”
He still did not answer, which was unusual. Edward was an attentive husband; still, Jane knew with great certainty, firmly in love with his wife as she was with him. Theirs was an enduring partnership.
She reached for his hand. It lay on the table beside the paper, completely limp and idle, which was also unusual. Edward's fingers were almost never still, even when the rest of him was supposedly relaxed. His hands kept dancing, sometimes even in his sleep.
Edward did not seem to notice when his wife took his hand. His fingers remained limp, and he continued to stare out the bank of windows. Jane turned her head to see what he might be looking at. There was nothing out there of which he could conceivably have had enough. There was a grass terrace surrounded by dormant roses and ancient, naked-limbed lilacs. Below that was the gardener’s cottage, a low picket fence around the dead kitchen gardens, a few magnificent old oaks with the big barn and the stables just visible on the other side their stout trunks. “Enough of what, dear?” Jane asked again, squeezing his hand.
Edward, at last, turned to look at her. He smiled, but it was, his wife thought, a somewhat weary smile for Edward at seven-thirty in the morning. Mornings were usually the most energetic part of his high-energy days.
“Has it ever occurred to you that you and I are not comfortable having so much money?” he asked.
Ah, Jane thought, so our wealth has finally become one of Edward’s ethical dilemmas. But then it had only been a matter of time. Ethical dilemmas of all ilks lay in wait for her husband like a herd of bogeymen. She admired her Edward for many things, but most of all for his consistent effort to do the right thing. And not in a naive way, either. Edward did not believe in simplistic solutions for complicated problems.
“Yes, of course it has,” Jane said. And indeed their vast net worth seemed accidental to her, as though they’d won it on a quiz show. What had she – or even Edward, who loved to write and would have done it as a hobby if he weren’t paid millions – ever done to deserve wealth when others had nothing? Edward, alone, was empathetic when she voiced these concerns, reminding her that it was natural for her to feel that way because she was surrounded by poverty and desperation every day at work. Everyone else – including her colleagues at social services – thought she was nuts.
Edward picked up the magazine. “Let me read you this," he said. “It's from an article by Joseph Stiglitz he calls, ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%'.”
"Oh my," Jane said.
Edward held up a hand. “Just one paragraph: ‘The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security – they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.’ ” He looked up at her. “Do you think that's happened to us? Have we lost empathy with ordinary people?”
"No,” Jane said, thinking of her social work clients – and her household staff whom she thought of as her household colleagues, “I don't. Not yet, anyway. What makes you worry we have?”
Edward had lowered the magazine and was staring down at his plate. “Let me mull this over some more,” he said. “I seem to grow less and less comfortable with our being so rich, but I haven’t figured out yet if I think there’s anything we could, or should, do about it.”
“Anything I can help with?” Jane asked. “I’m a good listener.”
Which was true, at least when Edward was talking. Her mind did sometimes wander at cocktail parties or at meetings once people began repeating themselves, but over their decades together she’d listened carefully to Edward as he made several major changes in the direction of his life. They'd met when she was a senior at Smith, and he was a Columbia graduate working as a beat cop in Holyoke, Massachusetts, of all places, bent on doing his bit to clean up its depressingly mean streets. He was done being a cop by the time they’d married, when Edward was twenty-eight and she – clutching her brand new Masters in Social Work – had just turned twenty-three. Edward was in English graduate school by then, with two years left at the University of Virginia. After that, he’d taught public school at a notoriously-troubled Portsmouth, Virginia, high school. Her Edward was first and foremost an idealist, wanting to believe that one person could truly make a difference. He'd stayed at the high school for four years, and he had made a difference in perhaps a half-dozen students, but hundreds more had stared up at him with dead, uninterested eyes that wore at his soul and left him feeling depressed and ineffective. Edward’s difficulties, Jane had always thought, were caused by the fact that he’d grown up in such a large, loving, honest family. It had not prepared him at all for dealing realistically with the institutionalized anger, dysfunction and despair of urban poverty.
It had been her suggestion that Edward start writing dystopian novels in which one person could actually make a difference. His first book – surprise! surprise! – was set in a 2072 urban high school that taught government-mandated nonsense by rote, and featured a fearless, rebellious English teacher hero. The novel had gotten excellent reviews, and the first printing sold out in a week. There had been a bidding war over movie options, and a movie had actually been made with real Hollywood stars. Edward had written full-time after that. A book every three years or so, all of them critical successes and, for the most part, huge moneymakers, for as America had marched into the Twenty-first Century, dystopia had first become a trend and then a trend on steroids. The country had fallen in love with reactive rage.
After the triumph of the first movie, Edward and she had enough financial depth so that their money began to pile up more money on its own. Edward had a knack for involving himself with brilliant financial people. Currently, these people said, the two of them were worth at least half-a-billion dollars.
Five hundred million one-dollar bills.
The figure was quite meaningless to both of them. They'd bought and restored this house, its surrounding land and buildings and, to some extent, adopted the lifestyle Summerfield traditionally demanded of its occupants. They’d traveled, they hosted occasional grand parties for charities, they’d seen to it that all of Edward’s large family and her widowed father lived in comfortable circumstances. They’d educated, but not spoiled, their only child – at least until he was grown and launched on his own independent path as an actor. A year ago Joe had landed an ongoing part on a soap, and he was beginning to get quite a bit of off- and off-off-Broadway work. So now, in truth, they were beginning to spoil him a little. They had, for example, helped him buy and renovate his loft when it went co-op. But by that time, both she and Edward told themselves with almost-certainty that Joe had had enough struggles and successes on his own, so that he’d never let parental money muddle the natural course of his life.
And so here she and Edward were, eating breakfast together on a late fall day – happy with life, happy with each other. Generally happy, as far as Jane knew. But then, she was not Edward.
Edward snapped to. His hand came alive and finally squeezed hers back. “Enough,” he said. “I need to make some calls and learn more. Then we can discuss it. Right now, I’ve got to get to work. Allen wants to see six chapters by the end of the month.”
This, Jane knew was hooey. It was Edward who set himself deadlines for his books. Allen Krump, his editor, was delighted to get whatever Edward sent, whenever he sent it. Edward was that rare mega-selling author who was also a good writer.
Edward left her with a squeeze of the shoulder and a kiss on the forehead. He wasn’t going far. Edward wrote in a converted slave quarters that still stood on the other side of the gardener’s cottage. It was essentially a low brick room, twelve by twenty-four feet that had once been partitioned down the center so as to accommodate two families of house slaves. Edward had insisted on leaving remnants of that partition when the builders had redone the quarters, saying he wished to be reminded daily of man’s capacity for shabby dealings with those over whom he held sway. Edward had placed his desk up against one side of this jagged fringe of bricks, and when she went to call him for lunch, Jane frequently discovered her husband deep in thought, staring out the big windows that looked toward the Blue Ridge, one hand idly caressing those remnants of human bondage.
“I not have to take this!” Espanza announced indignantly. Paguito, her thirteen-month-old son, toddled out from behind his mother and tacked happily towards Jane. Once he collided with her shin, Paguito pointed up at what was left of the toast on her plate. She automatically pulled him up on her knees and allowed him to help himself. Paguito was the house pet as much as he was Espanza’s son.
“What is it that Mrs. Stephens wants this time?” Jane asked. Mrs. Stephens was the housekeeper. Espanza Delgado was the cook. Maintaining détente between them required constant mediation.
“She want me and my grandmother to stop talking to Paguito in Spanish!” Espanza said, raising both hands in the air to better express her outrage. “She say it better for him if we speak only English. I say it none of her business how Mama Rosa and I talk to my son. Beside Mama Rosa, she not know much English. So what she supposed to do? Not say nothing to her own grandson?”
“Of course not,” Jane said. “Mama Rosa can communicate with Paguito in any way she pleases. It’s good for him to grow up speaking both languages.”
“Tha’s what I say to Mrs. Stephens. I say two language better than one, any day. But she tell me I not know what’s best for Paguito, and she do. How she supposed to know what’s best for my little boy? She not have any children that I notice. I don’t think she even like children. She always talking about Paguito being seen, but not heard. What fun is that for a little boy who love to talk and sing and make noise?”
Paguito, finished now with Jane’s toast, had reared up in her lap and was preparing to crawl up on the table and retrieve Edward’s breakfast leavings as well. Without thinking, Jane reached for Edward’s plate and stacked it on top of her own. Paguito gave a little crow of delight and snatched up a half-piece of toast that Edward had smeared with strawberry jelly and then abandoned. He waved the toast around like a victory flag, raising his voice in a spontaneous song of praise to the world in general. What fun would it be for any of us if Paguito was not heard? Jane thought, as she gave the boy a squeeze.
His mother, however, was not distracted by Paguito’s endearing performance. “So?” Espanza demanded, her hands now firmly on her hips, her head high, her posture that of a flamenco dancer about to launch into action.
Jane stifled a sigh. Espanza and Mrs. Stephens were like two frayed electrical wires. Whenever they came in contact, sparks flew. Ten months of proximity had not changed this. “I don’t suppose you could just ignore her?”
“No, I could not! That woman always butting in where she should butt out. And I not have to take it, I say. I go to Jane, I say, and she decide who’s right. Jane, I say, do not like bossy people. That’s why she have us call her Jane.”
Jane nodded. Espanza was right about that. Everyone at Summerfield was on a first-name basis. She had tried when she and Edward first came to the estate to live with more traditional help who called her Mrs. Blackwell, but as those proper servants had left, she’d filled their positions with “domestic assistants,” people whom she bumped into through her own work who needed jobs. What Jane had learned about herself, through trying and failing to be a proper rich person, was that she would never be comfortable heading a hierarchical household. Her parents had been near socialists – probably the only near-socialist Shenandoah Valley dairy farmers in the state’s history, and Jane would simply never be at peace ordering around anyone who lived under the same roof with her, even if it was a roof she and her husband owned.
Only Mrs. Stephens remained Mrs. Stephens, because that was how she’d come to them. Mrs. Stephens’ father had been Summerfield’s last proper butler. She’d been born on the estate and lived there until she’d gone off of to Sweet Briar College in the late 60s. After graduation, she’d married and quickly divorced a shadowy man whom she never mentioned and then come “home” to Summerfield in 1979 to assume full housekeeping duties for the last hereditary owner. Mrs. Stephens had opened the door to Edward and Jane when they’d come to take possession. She’d formally ushered them into the center of the large entrance hall, and, then and there, explained her duties, which boiled down to the fact that she was in charge. Jane had let Mrs. Stephens stay on. Dislodging the woman had seemed not only difficult but cruel. Where would she go? What would she do? And who would give a Rhett Butler's damn about her if she and Edward didn’t?
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Stephens,” Jane said.
“When?” Espanza demanded, hands still on hips.
“After work?” Jane suggested, hearing how she’d phrased what she’d meant to be a firm statement as a tentative question. Summerfield operated more like a commune than a private household. Any decision was open to negotiation.
“Before work, you tell that woman not to boss me around about my son!” Espanza countered, sensing the strength of her bargaining position. She knew her Jane, and, as she had just said, her Jane did not like bossing. “Okay?”
By this time, Paguito had finished the toast and was reaching for the jam pot, which, in Jane’s opinion, crossed the line between the allowed and the forbidden. Automatically, she plucked Paguito off her lap, set him down on his small feet, and, giving him the gentlest of shoves, sent him toddling off towards his mama. “Okay,” Jane said, thinking how often the complications of running her own home reminded her of the complications of social work.
Edward was in his studio, but he wasn’t writing. Instead he’d taken down the copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry his mother had given him when he’d gone to Columbia, sat down at his desk, and opened the book to a Wordsworth sonnet his mother had often recited to him as a child.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Wordsworth went on in his sappy Wordsworthian way to full sonnet length, but it was only those first two lines that stuck in Edward’s head and made him wonder about how having a lot of money might have pulled him off a richer and more rewarding course.
His early religious training was in there as well, goading Edward into thinking that he really should do things differently from now on. His mother and father had been, and still were, staunch but liberal Methodists. The Jesus who stalked Edward’s childhood had taught that the only real life was one of tolerance, good works, and genuine concern for the welfare of others. Genuine, hands-on concern. Not the sanitized concern of contribution and convenience. The Jesus of Edward’s youth had waded into crowds of unhappy people and done whatever he could to make those people’s lives better. The Jesus of Edward’s youth hadn’t kept anything back for himself; hadn’t wanted anything beyond the basic necessities of life. So how come all of the rich politicians who went on and on about how Christian they were didn't feel any necessity to emulate that character trait of the Christ they professed to follow so devoutly? If Jesus happened to reappear today, most likely they'd lock him up as a terrorist.
Edward sighed and fired up his lap-top. His to-do list immediately popped up on the screen. He was supposed to write until lunch, for which he was to meet a friend at the Bellaire Market. This was an old Exon station on Route 250 that had started serving really good sandwiches years ago and was now one of those chic places Charlottesvillians embraced, because it didn’t look chic on the outside. Later this afternoon, he was scheduled to stop by Thomas Herndon’s office and sign papers to shelter his latest whack of movie money from a huge tax hit.
Edward thoughtfully propped his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers. Thomas Herndon might actually be someone he could talk to about this dilemma. They’d been close friends since Columbia, and Thomas had been his main financial advisor since Edward had had enough money to need advising.
Thomas had moved to Charlottesville from New York City in early 2002. His New York office had been a block from Ground Zero, and Thomas had spent the morning of September 11, 2001, running uptown, inhaling noxious dust, and dodging flying rubble. After a couple of blank months spent regrouping, he’d decided to semi-retire down in Charlottesville. The semi-retirement part of Thomas’ plan hadn’t worked out, however, as a lot of his clients had stayed with him. Nevertheless, Thomas appeared to be thriving in the de rigueur laid-backness of his new hometown. He was the one person Edward knew really well who could give him hardnosed but honest expert advice about moving around wads of money. Thomas would think he was crazy, of course, and would be unmoved by any Wordsworth citations, but he would certainly know how to set up a charitable foundation.
The morning was a mostly cloudy one, but a wand of sunlight momentarily flashed out, hit the screen of Edward's laptop, then disappeared. For the last fifteen years, Edward had spent most weekday mornings in this quiet sanctuary. He looked around him now and felt a tidal wave of anxiety wash over him at the thought of meddling with his current lifestyle. His quiet, creative mornings would certainly change shape, if not disappear entirely. In fact, everything about everything was liable to change if he and Jane really were to use their personal fortune to take a public stand for a radically different set of “moral values” from those espoused by those who currently espoused them so publically.
Edward sat back and rested his hand on the architectural remnants of slavery beside him, trying to trace the exact origin of his current ethical quagmire. His parents had certainly imbued him with discomfort for a high level of getting and spending for getting and spending’s sake. But his strengthening impulse to divest – or more accurately invest in others less fortunate than he and Jane – didn't feel as much a reaction against anything as it was a pull toward something else. He’d reread the New Testament recently, focusing particularly on the Sermon on the Mount with its admonitions against praying in public and greed and power mongering. Since he and Jane didn’t go to church, he’d felt free to read the Gospel unfiltered by church doctrine and preacherly instruction.
During his time of closet Bible study, Edward had become more and more convinced that, even if you couldn't swallow the Son-of-God theory, Jesus really was The Man, the one person he knew of in history who’d lived as we all should live. Jesus was brave, he was at peace with himself, he was fully involved with the world, and he was completely undistracted by stuff. By his second time through St. Mark, Edward had found himself saddled with his current compulsion to literally emulate Jesus by using what he had to help others. He’d realized how tired he was of trying to assuage his conscience by giving generously to Public Radio, going to Party Parade parties, donating hundreds of Summerfield’s daffodils to the Cancer Foundation’s spring flower sale, putting up solar panels, and then telling himself that maybe the conservatives in Washington were right, that the money-making investments of the rich really did fuel an economy with enough trickle-down to eventually take care of the nameless millions who lived in grinding, inescapable poverty.
Well, baloney on that!
The truth was that he and Jane were really, really, really rich, while around them lived many others who were really, really, really poor about whom nobody in power gave a rat’s ass. Well, WWJD, as those funny little bracelets kids had worn for a couple of years to remind them not to have sex.
Only, to avoid any questions about divinity, Edward had begun thinking of Jesus as his historical friend Clarence. Probably after of the angel Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life, which his family had watched every year on television. Angel Clarence had always seemed so down-home to Edward, so comfortable to be around, so much someone he could rely on. What could possibly be wrong with thinking of Jesus as the same kind of guy?
So the question for him had become recently, in all seriousness: What Would Clarence Do? If his historical friend woke up one morning as a member of the Super Rich of the Twenty-first Century, what would he do with his wads of superfluous wealth?
Of course, he’d only consider doing anything if Jane were completely in sync with him on it. Still holding onto the remnants of slavery beside him, Edward conjured up a comforting image of his wife. At this moment, she would probably be getting into her car for her morning drive into Charlottesville.
Edward felt another giant wave wash over him; this one, of deep devotion and love for his life’s chosen partner. He couldn’t imagine any other woman even listening to her husband if he were to float the suggestion that they simply give away everything they didn’t really need. While Jane, his Jane, would, Edward knew, not only listen but consider it carefully.
Just look at the car she drove, a twelve-year-old Subaru wagon that didn’t even have automatic windows or heated seats.
Edward didn’t know another wealthy woman who would flatly refuse to trade up to such comforts because the car she drove now was paid for and still perfectly good.
Jane Blackwell, née Burkholder, had always worked. It was in her blood. She came from hardy farm stock, the only child of older parents who’d worked harder than any two people she’d ever known and given away an awful lot of the little they’d had. Her father, at 81, still worked his dairy farm, although she and Edward had finally persuaded him to get a live-in couple to help around the place.
For the past four years, since Joe had graduated from college, Jane had worked full-time as a social worker for the City of Charlottesville, spending five days a week deep in the city's rougher neighborhoods, grappling with one unsolvable family problem after another, brought on by poverty, substance abuse, parental neglect, gangs – you name it. To see the toll poverty and substance abuse took on a sizeable number of Charlottesvillians, all you had to do was open your eyes and look.
It was a little after three in the afternoon. The four Strand children, Tiffany, just turned 6, Charlie, 4, Brianne, 3, and Timmy, thirteen months, sat extremely close together beside her on the front courtroom bench. Timmy was huddled in Tiffany’s lap; the other three children were in physical contact at every possible point.
The five of them – four Strands and herself – had been sitting here since two-fifteen, waiting their turn before the judge. The children had not said one word. Fear and confusion had struck them mute. They were dressed in new clothes, and they all had that slightly raw look that children get when they have spent the night as guests of Social Services and been given a good scrubbing. Their hair was freshly trimmed and they looked as though, for once, they’d had enough to eat. Jane was certain they’d lived mainly on soft drinks and Cheetos for months. When Ella, their mother, got high, she craved Cheetos. Letting her kids scrounge whatever was left in the bag when she either passed out or went out was Ella’s version of feeding them when she was deeply into her drugs of choice.
Jane sat calmly beside her small huddled mass, their guardian of the moment, something she had been twice before. She had no doubt that Ella Strand really loved her children in her own, pathetic, drug-addicted way. Ella’s history said she would get out of jail and detox desperately wanting them back and swearing she was done with drugs and prostitution forever. Twice before, the court had sent the children back, and the five of them had had a few happy weeks together until a new boyfriend offered Ella a hit on a crack pipe free of charge. She would control her drug use for short while, then something stressful would happen, and she’d begin getting high every chance she got, using any means she had to get drugs. The judge, Jane knew, was tired of Ella and worried about her children. This was probably the last time ever that the four children would sit together. Ella was about to lose custody of them permanently, and no foster home on Jane’s books was set up to take four small children.
Actress Jean Hagen piped up in Jane’s head. I cyaaaan’ stan’ it! Jane smiled, in spite of her sad surroundings. No matter how many times she saw Singin’ in the Rain, Jean Hagen saying that one line always made her laugh out loud. Today, however, it seemed to Jane as though Jean Hagen voiced her own feelings. She had no idea why she’d let these children seep into her head in such a personal way. But seep they had, and she, like Jean Hagen, simply couldn’t stand it – “it," for Jane, being the thought that the Strand children might lose each other.