Free Mortal Friends by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

want to talk about?”
    “Anything but politics,” he replied.
    “Good. Because I don’t know anything about politics.”
    “My dear young lady, this town is full of people who don’t know anything about politics and who talk about nothing but . Talking heads with nothing to say.”
    “Young lady, eh? I’m so flattered.”
    “Which half is incorrect?”
    “I plead the fifth. So what state are you from?”
    He froze for a split second as if I’d slapped him. “ Nebraska ,” he said, like it was a fact any schoolgirl should know.
    “Guess what state I’m from?” I said playfully.
    “Ignorance,” he replied, without missing a beat.
    “Ha. Ha. New York. Originally. Are you a Democrat or Republican?” He shook his head in perturbed disbelief. “Don’t take it so personally. I don’t know what party anyone’s from.”
    “Know what party the president’s from?”
    “Don’t make me answer that.”
    “You better not be one of these people who complains about the country all the time.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “’Cause if you don’t make it your business to find out who’s running the country, you have no business complaining about it. Who’d you vote for last election?”
    “I never vote. It only encourages them, as they say,” I said, staring him down.
    His straw lips twitched into what seemed to be his version of a smile. He cranked out a rusty hinge of a laugh.
    “Very funny,” he said, mirthlessly.
    Senator Grider was the human equivalent of string.
    Throughout the dinner, I kept glancing at Bob, who was talking a little too animatedly with Cynthia. I was careful never to let him catch my eye. But I was irritated that Violet hadn’t switched us at the beginning of the meal. Now it was too late.
    Toward the end of dinner, Douglas Reed, the president of the Folger, ambled up to a standing microphone in front of the cavernous stone fireplace to thank the writers and all of us for supporting PEN/Faulkner. At the very end, he said, “And now I have a surprise announcement. I’ll be brief because I can’t compete with all the great writers here tonight. But what I have to say will enhance the future of writers everywhere. The Cynthia A. Rinehart Foundation is donating ten million dollars to our beloved Folger Shakespeare Library! Cynthia, will you please come up here and say a few words?”
    Cynthia rose from the table, accompanied by strong, appreciative applause. Senator Grider popped up like a periscope. His chilly eyes focused on her as she snaked her way through the room. At the microphone, she assumed a pious position, hands folded, head slightly raised, as if she were addressing angels in the rafters of that vaulted room. She launched into a speech about philanthropy, calling it “global goodness,” and how it had always been her dream to be a writer.
    “But my talent lies in giving, not writing,” Cynthia said earnestly.
    Grider leaned in and whispered to me: “She the one just donated all that dough to the Kennedy Center?”
    “The very one,” I whispered back.
    “Generous gal,” he murmured, narrowing his eyes.
    I remember thinking I wouldn’t have wanted Zachary Grider squinting at me like that. He watched Cynthia wend her way back to her seat. She was stopped en route by a few people offering her their congratulations. Grider didn’t take his eyes off her until she sat down at our table again. Then he turned to me and said, “You know her?”
    “Kind of. She’s just bought Gay Harding’s old house, and she’s asked me to decorate it for her.”
    “You a decorator, are you?”
    I explained that I hadn’t been a decorator for years, that I owned an antiques shop, but that the offer to decorate Mrs. Harding’s old house was just too tempting to turn down.
    “So this Rinehart gal bought Gay Harding’s old house, did she?”
    “Yup. She paid fifteen million dollars.”
    Grider didn’t respond, but I sensed a file drawer opening in his brain.
    “My wife liked to