The Aristocrat by Conrad Richter

Author:Conrad Richter [Richter, Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5017-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter ix

OWN COUNCIL was baffled, my father said, when Miss Alexandria accepted. Fit to be tied, was the expression he used.

“They thought they had her fast,” he told me, “but they don’t know her like I do.” The word, council, is plural in Unionville.

Not that this in any way settled the matter. Miss Alexandria smiled graciously on Solly Mengel in charge of the dump and asked him to stop burning cartons and paper. Councilman Minnichbach told him to pay no attention and a majority of council backed him up. Not the one to engage with her inferiors, Miss Alexandria wrote the Secretary of Health at Harrisburg in her hieroglyphical hand, naming various Morley credentials. When she didn’t hear in the next mail or two, she asked Fanny to get his office on long distance whereupon she had her say in no uncertain terms over the telephone, able to hear nothing in return and never halting until she hung up. Whom she reached and what the astonished listener thought, we never knew but several days later the district engineer for the health department appeared at the front door looking cautious and very curious. Presently I could hear him laughing in the library. No doubt she amused him. Certainly there must have been few like her among the general run of small town health officers.

The district engineer went from Miss Alexandria to the dump, then to the mayor, ordered the burning stopped, the acres of rotten accumulation of garbage covered with ground and the process to be repeated at the end of each dumping day. At the next council meeting, my father said, there was hell to pay. The opposing majority declared they never could get enough ground or pay for a bulldozer to move it, but in the end the decree prevailed, smoke stopped drifting into Miss Alexandria’s window at night, her asthma attacks somewhat declined and a serene and impenetrable armor possessed her even, my father said, on her kitchen and toilet inspections where he took her in the car.

Somewhere I have come on a line of verse that takes me back to this particular time. It sounds like Shakespeare but who wrote it I really don’t know, only that after reaching the scene of battle,

“Richard was himself again.”

That was Miss Alexandria at this time. The polluters of her home town had been put in their place. She was again the gladiator swinging a golf club in the framed photograph that still hung in Miss Blanche’s room. She had gained three pounds, she told us. Of late years, food had been an anathema to her. Eggs, she insisted, made her bilious, cabbage poisoned her blood, milk formed indigestible curds in her stomach and even crackers were unfit for anything except autointoxication. If it hadn’t been for tea and toast, she used to say, she would have evaporated into thin air. Now she sat in her dining chair more or less content and ate most everything from the menu she dictated daily to Fanny.

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