Legacy by Dana Black Page A

you'll want to come on alternate days, or even work out a schedule of readings.'
     
    'Oh, yes,' said Amanda, 'we'll have to talk about that, won't we, Catherine?'
     
    'I'll be pleased to read to your patients, Dr.Dr. McKay,' I said. 'What time would you like ... us to be there?'
     
    We soon agreed to meet tomorrow afternoon after church, for the first day, and to take turns in the mornings thereafter. Then Amanda's attention was drawn away by Judge Hawthorne, whom Mother had purposely seated on her left. The judge, in his fifties, nonetheless came alive in the presence of a young lady, and especially, it seemed, in the presence of Amanda. She had all she could do to maintain a polite smile on her face. As I watched her struggling with the judge's droning witticisms, I felt amusement but also sympathy. There was nothing really wrong with Amanda. She had a good heart, from all I knew of her, and she was continually doing favors for people in connection with the church. Since her mother had died, she had become more or less the mainstay of social events there, which was quite a responsibility at her age. She was only two years older than I. Why not let her have her chance at a bit of happiness? She was working hard at being good, perhaps too hard. Maybe that was the only thing about her that I didn't like.
     
    Certainly I was not jealous because she had invited herself to share Dr. McKay's invitation to read to his patients. Dr. McKay was nothing to me. He was distant. He was a perfectionist. He was Father's idea.
     
    Suddenly I was seized with a thought that nearly made me laugh aloud. What if he had only been looking for someone to read at his clinic? Wouldn't that be a wonderful joke on Father?
     
    I wondered if that were the case. Dr. McKay was now talking with the woman on his right. I looked around the table. Above us the huge crystal-tiered chandelier glittered brilliantly. Around us the white linen glowed, and the gold filigree on the wine goblets shone. Those at the table were enjoying themselves. There were two ministers, three mill owners including Father and Dr. McKay, two lawyers, a judge, and their womenfolk. The net worth of this table was probably somewhere close to ten million dollars. Much of it was now in stocks and bonds and real estate, but it had all started with lumber, and that had all started with Father's idea for a lumber 'boom'. Once he had built the huge floating log corral upriver, branded logs could be kept secure until they were needed by the mills. Fewer were lost or stolen, and expenses decreased accordingly. But at the same time, with the war in the South, there was a huge rise in demand and the mills couldn't turn out enough boards to begin to satisfy the need. And so new mills had been built, and prices had gone up, and more logs were cut and branded and stored in the boom . . .
     
    And Father, instead of being a farmer or a lawyer, was now at the head of a table of millionaires. I looked at him again, and I was forced to admit that he did carry it off well. He enjoyed himself, and he made others around the table feel a part of his excitement as he planned more great deeds. I could hear him talking about the hotel he had opened last year in the middle of the oak park near our house: two hundred rooms, four stories, an enclosed park with six white-tailed deer, and a Continental chef. Also, there was a ninety-nine-year agreement with the Pennsylvania Railroad that their passenger trains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh would stop here for meals. And they would never move the station from where it now stood, only a hundred feet from the hotel's real entrance, even though the downtown section of Grampian was more than two miles away, further down the river. Was that an inconvenience for railway passengers who wanted to come to Grampian? Perhaps, but Father was just completing a trolley line into town for them. He had thought of everything.
     
    But he had not thought well enough for his