Titus is Back from the Dead, And Nick Pitches Woo to Mandy

Chapter 21 of Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People, a Serial Novel by Holly Nadler

London and Chilmark chatelaine, Priscilla Lytton, scrutinized her breakfast plate of peach slices, two hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters, and four quarter-sized squidges of kale for decoration. She adored the way small bits of kale looked like emerald green origami. Other than that, it served no valid purpose. To hell with its much-vaunted nutrients. Anything that scratched her throat as it slid down made it ineligible for eating.

She sat in their breakfast room designed as a solarium with rounded windows affording a sideways view of the sea. Lost in reveries about how ownership of oceanfront property made one feel splendidly well about oneself, she heard footsteps through the kitchen and, of all things, Titus stepped into the breakfast room.

Titus! He was no longer the feeble hospice wretch, but a standing, ambulatory, even snappy-looking version of Titus. Not only that, his pajamas and robe had been exchanged for tan trousers and a yellow Polo shirt.

“Good morning, darling!” he said brightly.

She gaped. Gaping was something the BBC’s Shockingly Good Taste hostess was hardly wont to do. Finally she stammered:

“Have you died and gone to Heaven, Titus? Because, if you have, what am I doing in the picture?”

He held his arms in an expansive gesture. “I can’t explain it! I woke up this morning steeling myself for the usual death bed ickyness, and, lo and behold!, I felt like a ten year-old! I performed a gavotte out of bed, and put on these clothes. If you’d like, I could sing ‘zippety doo dah”, and click up my heels!”

She shuddered. She knew there was more to probe in this matter of his full return to health – and she wasn’t entirely sure she was comfortable with it – but she was distracted by the mention of his outfit.

“Speaking of that, Titus,” she said with a critical narrowing of her eyes, and gesturing to her Chinese silk robe, a lovely gold bamboo design with a black background. “We’re wearing this little number today.”

He shook his head, then giggled like a schoolboy. “No more robes, sugarplum! You’re looking at a new Titus! Who knows how long this grace period of health will last? Could be my last twenty-four hours! I intend to make the most of it!”

“But – but what accounts for your recovery?!”

The brilliant man had given this some thought. Now he tipped his head with the one blue eye poking out from his mess of silver hair. “Two possibilities. One, our young Mandy Pease performed some sort of healing ceremony on me.”

Priscilla frowned. “What kind of ceremony?”

“Oh, you shockingly tasteful woman, do not even think there was hanky-panky involved! You know our Mandy! There’s something saintly about her. It was our usual confab. Albert the pig was spread out across my chest, Mandy said she would put healing energies into me, she tipped her forehead to my hand and, let me say this, her head was hot as a skillet all set for scrambling eggs. And here I am! Back on my feet again! Just don’t tell anyone about the Mandy connection! People will be coming to Lady Slipper Farm as if it’s Lourdes!”

Priscilla’s eyes were still narrowed. “And what was the other so-called ‘possibility’?”

He shrugged, palms turned upward. “I had a very bracing talk with Sonja.”

“Where would you have had that bracing talk?”

“She found me in the downstairs guest room.”

“And now I’m going to brace her!”

“No need, we have more important matters to thrash out.”

She set down her small fork to the left side of her plate, lining it up perfectly. Clearly she would not be eating breakfast – or any meal – anytime soon. When Priscilla encountered challenges in life, she stopped eating. At the best of times, she carried about a mere one hundred and ten pounds on a five foot eleven frame, so this tendency posed a threat to her very survival.

Not that anyone much cared. Oh, her tens of thousands of TV fans truly loved her, all those plebes who’d learned to mix Queen Anne’s lace with gentians and violets on their cramped dining room tables. But poor Priscilla had never achieved much success in getting people who actually knew her to care for her.

Titus was aware of this. Initially, when they’d met, he’d been smitten by her beauty and abundant flirtatiousness. But, of course, that was long ago, and he was now married to an entirely different person. He gazed at her as she sat forlorn before her cast-off breakfast. A pang of compassion filled his chest.

He pulled out a chair, turned it around, and slouched over it cowboy-style, his arms crossed over the back.

“Priscilla, I know my pending knighthood is important to you.”

“Are you about to tell me it won’t happen?”

“Not at all! I intend to clinch the deal! But in return I’ll need you to capitulate to me on a few particular points of order.”

Her features grew hard: not a pretty sight for someone who composed her face in a nearly constant camera-ready smile.

“What are these points of order, Titus?”

“Let’s walk to the bench that overlooks the cliffs, and we’ll hash it out.”

She looked appalled. “We’ve never sat on that bench! It’s for company during parties.”

He rose from his chair and extended a hand to her. “From this moment forward, let us behave as if we’re living for ourselves and not for the next party. I think you’ll find that advice in the Tao Te Ching.”

 *  *

Nick Diehl, on his nocturnal surprise drop-in to Lady Slipper Farm the previous night, failed to persuade Mandy to meet him for lunch or dinner at any time or any place, on any date of the summer, or ever.

“I’m too busy with work,” she told him. “The farm, the rental office, the catering – it’s unending.”

At last, with grave reluctance, she agreed to his stopping by the farm sometime during the summer, provided he pitched in on whatever work was at hand. That had been his idea:

“I’m not just a pretty face up on the ol’ silver screen!” he said. “I grew up in Bakersfield, California, and worked on ranches in my teens. I can tote those bales of hay as well as anyone!”

So now, at two in the afternoon, after Mandy, Lori and Gwyn had followed Kris to her house and helped her start the grim business of making funeral arrangement’s for Kris’s husband, Ed, Mandy was back in the Lady Slipper barn tending to the three new piglets and their mommy.

Two weeks old now, they had grown into their swollen heads, and tottered around their stall when they weren’t hoggishly nursing. Mandy picked up the runt who’d shown signs of a damaged right hind leg when his mom had rolled over on him after giving birth. It looked as if the leg were healing nicely.

“What do you think, Albert?” she asked to her steady companion. "'mo better?" She tipped the baby’s leg to her favorite pet’s big flat pink nose. Albert grunted and snuffled simultaneously, a feat that Mandy considered a sign of porcine genius.

And suddenly her stalker – the movie star Nick Diehl – appeared through the open barn doors.

He caught her glance, and was stricken by a smack of rejection; a totally unfamiliar sensation for him. He approached her, then collapsed on one knee. “I know I’m annoying you, but I’m here to beg you to hear me out! Mandy Pease, from the first time I saw you, I felt like Paul at the gates of Damascus. I’ve been with the worst women, and with them I’ve been the worst man, all of which sums up the normal course of the mating dance, and the human condition itself.

“But I know there’s a goodness in you that’s not of this world! I believe you can take my ridiculous and childish movie star ego and flatten it down to a Frisbee that we can toss away into a field. Please let me spend time with you! Let me plant some Tom Thumb lettuce or turn over your compost piles! You’ll like me, or at least the me that I can become with you! Worst case scenario, you’ll get some free labor, lots of free labor, if you want it! And it’ll be worth every penny!”

She sighed. It was hard to believe that a man so handsome, so charming, so funny, could appear so vulnerable, down there on his knees, on the hard-packed earth of her barn.

“Jesus H.,” she said with another sigh. “The Frisbee reminds me of a job. The dogs are indoors and they need exercise. You’ll find Frisbees in the mud room. Take them out with the dogs to the field beyond Sam’s potager.” She waved in the general direction. “After you feel ragged enough to drop on the spot, you’ll know the dogs do too.”

And then she turned her back on him to settle the piglet runt back down in his stall before she picked up the brush to go swab down Rochester. She had no way of knowing that, by dismissing the movie star without a second thought, she brought him to even greater heights of worship.

He walked away, slapping the dust from his jeans, wishing for all the world that he could court her the old-fashioned way: by, perhaps, bringing in a clerk from Tiffany’s with an entire counter’s-worth of diamonds, and plopping the whole shebang down at her doorstep with the whop-whop-whop of one of those nifty little Sikorsky helicopters.

That had worked with that Italian movie star – what was her name? Florinda Medici? Wow! They’d burned up some black satin sheets in her villa overlooking the Bay of Castellammare.

This was an entirely different story arc. This was love. He would win Mandy Pease if he had to toss all the Frisbees and shovel all the manure at Lady Slipper Farm.