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out the check is worth more—Oh, the hell with it, Frank. Take the money and run.”
    Sally was calling him from the house. “The master calls,” Castle said, turning on his heel and striding toward the front door.
    Frank climbed into his truck. Switching on the ignition, he looked at the two bills, still crushed in his hand. His hand was shaking with repressed anger, and at the same time he was telling himself that he had no reason to be angry. It was thirty minutes of driving back to Chickahominy, almost two hours if he counted the round-trip. Fuck Castle! He didn’t want to come home angry and face his wife angry. This kind of idiocy was worth a hundred dollars, and like Castle’s brain-damaged wife, Castle hadn’t pulled his small stunt to put Frank down. In Castle’s mind, it was a gift that Frank could stuff into his pocket and use as he pleased.
    Back in the huge white-enamel and stainless-steel kitchen, Abel Hunt was telling his son, “No, no, no. You do not make dressing in my kitchen with a Waring blender. You whip it by hand. Otherwise, mayonnaise is not mayonnaise. It’s inflated junk.”
    â€œPop,” Joseph said, “why do you hate technology?”
    â€œI don’t hate technology. I love cooking. I love good food. Good food distinguishes us from the barbarians among whom we live. Technology has nothing to do with cooking. Technology, in its broadest sense, simply substitutes an Ml6 for the pilum.”
    â€œWhat on earth is a pilum?”
    â€œOh, that’s beautiful!” Abel snorted. “Just beautiful! I spend my hard-earned money and lifelong skills to send my son to Harvard to prove that a dying, corroding mass of white Protestants can depend on us to take over and run things properly, and he asks me, What is a pilum?”
    â€œIs this what you want me to use on the mayonnaise?” asked Joseph, holding up a wire whip. “And by the way, I’m pre-med, and they feed it to you slowly. We’re not up to the pilum yet.”
    â€œYes, and whip light and even. God help us, if that’s what education is today! The pilum was the Roman weapon that conquered the world, a javelin six-foot long—three feet of wood, very heavy, and then a soft iron shaft with a steel point. It was thrown at close range, cut through shield and armor and into the body, and then the weight of the wooden part bent the soft iron, so that even if the soldier was not killed, his shield was useless.”
    â€œI don’t believe this,” his son said.
    â€œOf course, you don’t. You want this old nigger to be just as ignorant as his great grandfather. Please watch what you’re doing—round strokes.”
    â€œWho was your great grandfather?” Joseph asked.
    â€œA field hand. You don’t want a froth. You want a dressing.”

Three
    R uth Ferguson Sellig, Harold Sellig’s wife, was Sally Castle’s close friend. Sally had few friends. She played neither tennis nor golf, had limited graces, and never knew what to say in terms of conversation. With a small vocabulary, she fell into gaffs, such as substituting unsuitable for unstable , and her obvious blond beauty was threatening to the Back Country club crowd. Ruth Sellig had encountered her at a charity affair at a time when Ruth was working on a Vanity Fair spread on Marilyn Monroe look-alikes. Ruth asked Sally whether she could photograph her, and Sally was delighted, although with the caveat that she had to ask permission from her husband, Richard.
    With such permission readily granted, she became a frequent model for Ruth Sellig, which not only earned her pocket money but found her someone she could talk to. Ruth, an easy mark for any stray, came to, like Sally; and although Sally was near forty, old enough to be Ruth’s sister, the relationship was curiously mother and daughter. Ruth became a sort of confessor. When, for example, Sally told her that she used