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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 The Lost Commodore William Lee Belford Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE LOST COMMODORE By WILLIAM LEE BELFORD JR A dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of William Lee Belford Jr defended on March 21, 2006. Mark Winegardner Professor Directing Dissertation Roberto Fernández Outside Committee Member Julianna Baggott Committee Member Barry Faulk Committee Member Approved: Hunt Hawkins, Chair, English Department Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii This book is dedicated to my loving parents for all of their support. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………… v 1. AT THE HOUR WHEN THE BLACKGUARD MEETS THE SULTAN.... 1 2. THE VERY LAST WOMAN IN THE WORLD.......................................... 18 3. THE FOURTH TENOR, VINCENT NOSERELLI...................................... 32 4. BACKDOOR TO ADVENTURE................................................................ 49 5. THE LOST COMMODORE ...................................................................... 68 6. THE THIN WHITE DUKE ......................................................................... 92 7. THE LAST DETAIL .................................................................................. 110 8. THE PLAYBOY PRESIDENT.................................................................... 130 9. THREE CHEERS FOR THE MULLIGAN ................................................. 145 10. NO MORE ROSES FOR THE MATADOR .............................................. 166 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................... 192 iv ABSTRACT This dissertation is a collection of ten short stories. Each story is a work of fiction composed by the author during the years 2004-2006 as a student in the Creative Writing PhD program at Florida State University. v AT THE HOUR WHEN THE BLACKGUARD MEETS THE SULTAN Wigs. The south wall of the drawing room was lined with three shelves of faceless cedar dummy heads wearing powdered wigs. Some were long and plaited like Louis XIV’s, others more masculine, with severe widow’s peaks, like George Washington’s or a Romanian blood-drinking count’s. One was woven with tightly rolled bills, foreign currency, pink and blue pastels, and might have been the headdress of some psychedelic barrister. Bachman Lachlan Macalister was the kind of man who collected wigs and, strangely, pulled it off. He was a creature endowed with a peculiar grace. He was also the brother and only surviving family of my fiancée Virginia. Reclined on a Chippendale divan upholstered in vermilion damask and wearing a smoking jacket of the same hue, he refilled both his and my highballs with scotch from a Waterford decanter. His feet, shod in black velvet slippers embroidered in gold thread with the Macalister coat of arms, were small, delicate, girlish things propped up on the damask ottoman. Bachman had asked me to accept a commission in his War of Independence reenactment regiment, an enterprise I had always regarded as childish and ridiculous. “You’re sure to enjoy yourself,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of gunplay.” We hardly knew each other, he went on, and if I was to marry his little sister then he insisted we become better acquainted. Of course, I’d known Bachman my whole life; only he had never deigned to know me. Off and on he was in my class at Country Day, a few years at a time until he was kicked out for good our freshman year and finished out at Woodberry, then St. Andrews, and finally at Georgia Military. “Listen, Duncan,” Bachman continued, “I could promote from within the ranks, but those guys are just so…déclassé. It’s one thing to give a cracker an order, but to invite him into your tent for a drink of whisky or game of chance is another thing entirely. I need an aide-de-camp with whom I can spend some quality time.” He sat up and looked me in the eyes. “One of us. Know what I mean?” One of us. I’d grown up in the right neighborhood, gone to the right schools, worn the right clothes. My childhood was not one spent in penury. But the money that had groomed and fed me and given me raiment was new money, brand spanking new 1 merchant’s money. What status I enjoyed had been purchased. Bachman was the well- bred, landed gentry bugbear in my dreams whose acceptance I craved and whose scorn, when I arrived underdressed at dream-weddings and dream-receptions, I dreaded. I lurked at the periphery of society, at best a guest, never a member. I was not one of them. I rose from my seat on the chesterfield and walked to the south wall where I took down a bulbous, pale lavender peruke and donned it at a rakish angle, feeling like a Viennese fop. “Okay, Bachman, I’ll give it a whirl.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” my fiancée said. Virginia stood before the carcass of an eleven-point buck hanging upside down by its hind legs from a cleaning rack, her arms elbow deep in the gaping abdominal cavity. Her canvas coveralls were foul with offal. I kissed her on the forehead. A lock of nut- brown hair had come loose from its bun and was stuck to her cheek by a dollop of crusted blood. Virginia had sharp features, high cheek bones and a pointy nose, and brilliantine blue eyes, very much the spitting image of her older brother, even the same fullness of the lips. The flecks of blood in her crow’s feet became her. From inside the animal she pulled the stomach, a greenish sack that looked near to bursting, and dropped it in the gut bucket where it made a loud splat. She sheathed her skinning knife and brushed her gory hands on the bib of her coveralls and took the beer I handed her. “You’re going to play dress-up with Little Lord Fauntleroy?” “That’s one way of putting it.” “He’s gone crazy, you know,” Virginia said. “Ape-shit,” I added. “Exactly. He wasn’t always like this. He’s the one who taught me to hunt. Bachman never did go in for any of those role-playing games or make-believe in general. He was an athlete. You remember. Football. Lacrosse. Crew. An expert fisherman.” “Used to tie his own flies,” I said. “He’d bring them to school.” “That’s what I’m talking about,” Virginia said. “I think it all began with the fencing class he took in college.” 2 I remembered the fencing team at my university. Team Hobbit, we used to call them. “This reenactment stuff,” she continued. “It’s just so weird. Grown men putting on costumes and playing army like a bunch of little boys. You know,” she paused to drain her beer. “The whole enterprise strikes me as a tad bit gay.” She looked me dead- on and raised an eyebrow. “Listen, honey,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I only said yes because he’s your brother.” But this was not entirely true. For one thing, I didn’t have anything better to do. I didn’t work, that’s for sure. After my parents died I sold the family business and had been able to live comfortably, albeit frugally, off of the interest. Mostly I sailed. Or puttered around in Virginia’s garden, keeping it pruned and weeded. It was winter, which meant that when Virginia wasn’t shooting deer, she was shooting ducks. Occasionally I’d go duck hunting with her. You didn’t have to sit still and be quiet like you did hunting deer. You could have yourself a little social behind the blind, sardines, whisky, dirty jokes. I loved those mornings, the creak of good leather, the glint of the early sun off the double barrels of my Fox- Sterlingworth side-by-side, my nose numb and my feet cold to the bone, the musty smell of wool and oilskin, the rose-water smell of Virginia’s hair, the way the fog of our breath commingled. The way she out-shot me two to one. For another thing, as odd as he had become, I felt myself drawn to Bachman. His hair was just thick enough, curled in the right places, no ungainly cowlicks, his skin smooth and evenly tanned, his dress both impeccable and careless (with the exception of the smoking jacket and velvet slippers—those were affectations)—rumpled khakis and duck boots at a Turner’s Rock oyster roast, Barbour coat over herringbone tweed en route to the club in the rain. Country squire, landed gentry—at parties he’d stick his left hand in the hip pocket of his double-breasted blazer like some exiled son of the House of Windsor (I may have had the right clothes, but Bachman knew how to wear them with a sort of studied negligence). The people on their mother’s side were Yankees who came 3 over on the Mayflower, which is as close as you can get to royalty over here in the colonies. Bachman Macalister was everything I was not, not yet, that is. “These boots,” I said, “they’re both the same.” I was sitting on a wooden footlocker inside a white canvas tent, Bachman’s— Brigadier General Augustine Prevost’s, rather—quarters, which he had appointed with Persian rugs and tasseled throw pillows. It might have been some sultan’s vacant harem, save for the watercolor fox hunting scene, gilt-framed and propped on an easel in the corner. I held one of a pair of black leather cavalry boots that came up over the knee and were polished to a high gloss with squared-off toes and hobnailed soles.

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