Since his family was an old one (“old and rotten,” he liked to quote William Carlos Williams), he had a sense of other towns and who their leading families were. He’d always arrive at the town hall a bit early. There, he could mill around out front and chat up farmers about crop allotments and outlawed pesticides, he could talk to housewives about the mahimahi being sold at Piggly Wiggly since March and how rare you dared to serve it, and he was not above mentioning his other vice: All My Children. Tad once told me after an especially successful meeting (in which he saved the 1873 Conger-Halsey Academy for Girls outside Rocky Mount), “I swear, Mary Ellen, keeping up with a good soap, it’s the next best thing to being a Mason.”

  Meeting was called to order; first thing, he’d get up and say his usual grinning “Hi,” then tell a joke about some boy hick getting the better of a society woman trying to cheat him out of his sainted mother’s pie-safe at a flea market over in Swan Quarter. His accent was one kind of icebreaker, the seeming irreverence another.

  Tad would then begin his slide presentation about some local building these folks had been driving past their whole lives, one they’d assumed to be merest shack and eyesore, one held up mostly by its own Virginia creeper and poison ivy old enough to grow berries big as scuppernong grapes. Tad Worth’s talks never lasted more than 22 minutes. I checked. Others, watches readied, forgot to. He congratulated locals on the important period piece they’d all helped keep standing till this very hour. He presented stories about who’d built it and why; he specialized in the early builders’ faults, erotic peccadilloes and hobbies and, always a plus, the deaths of any of their young children. Not a dry eye in the house. Right up to the wainscoting ledge of the shameless, young Squire Worth oftimes went. He used to quote his beloved Jane Austen, “One does not love a place less for having suffered in it.” He told what church the home-builders had attended, and which of that sanctuary’s rose windows they’d donated in 1814, and by the end, our Mr. Worth had mentioned the family name—legitimately mentioned—of most people present, including the security guards.

  Tad never scheduled anything after. He knew that if his pitch to save a structure worked he’d be instantly invited to one, if not three homes of the competitive local hostesses. (Here in society North Carolina at least, each town is going to have either two or three “leader art patrons.” There’s never only one.) Many’s the night we arrived back home in Hillsborough after 2 a.m. Tad understood how this was all part of it, making himself available (to each jealous hostess in turn, if need be).

  I don’t know when he caught the missionary fervor about old houses. He’d grown up in one that had been lost. Maybe that set him on his course. Or maybe during college, at Charlottesville? I once asked him why he matriculated there. “For the real estate?” He laughed. I’m not sure if such long local midnight parties bored him as they sometimes did me. (I shall hold my own tongue here.) But if so, Tad certainly never showed it. He never condescended; he had his loves and his strong dislikes but he did not fail to look all kinds of people in the eye. “Never met a stranger.” We now claim 110 city chapters in this state, and each represents dozens of not-that-riveting 2 a.m.’s, much Triscuit-eating by our Tad. Two-thirty and he still sat there, overanimating some creweled wing chair, discussing the recent tuition increase at Ravenscroft School and the best way to make your new garden statuary look ancient: pour a half a gallon of buttermilk on it and watch the setting in of what Tad called “the blue-chip greenies.”

  You will remember that young Mr. Worth was accompanied most everywhere by his brown low-stomached dachshund bitch, Circa. He said he called her that because, whenever you thought of her, she was “always Around Then.” She was the bad dog you often find near your most accommodating people. (It seems they let their dogs take it out in trade.) Some people complained Tad Worth’s zeal for saving broken houses was overshadowed by one dog he never housebroke.

  I recall how the construction fellows at Sandover, the hired workers (not we volunteers), always got a kick out of Circa, her carrying on in that intelligent if indolent manner. But, you see, they heard her name as “Circus.” And Tad was much too gentlemanly—meaning too smart, kind, or efficient—to try explaining the joke (“No, boys, ‘Circa,’ you recall, is an art-historical term,” etc.) “Tadbud, you got her name right,” one fellow called from the gable roof, “’At dog’s a pure-tee circus.” Just then she was running around the big house, and Tad, that quick, pointed as she wheezed around the corner a third time, said, “Yeah, Bobby Ray. A three-ring circus.” Roofers, laughing, shook their heads. I saw again how good Tad was at taking others’ mistakes, period mistakes, class mistakes, even our failures of nerve or character, and setting some period pediment atop them. A true Jeffersonian. He did that during this particular widow woman’s Chapter Eleven of life; walked in, “Knock knock,” and placed a finial or crown upon the head of one old lady wearing an extremely unattractive pistachio-green chenille robe.

  Tad himself was also always around, always talkative, and his shirttail forever seemed to be coming out, and he kept threatening to do sit-ups when he someday got around to it, “just as soon as Burleigh Hall is finally secure.” He did have faults. If I’ve already presumed to point out Jefferson’s, I don’t think Tad would mind my adding a few of his own. I never quite trust eulogies that make out anyone to be angelic. No one utterly is. Such saccharine gush would, to employ one of Tad’s own oversalty phrases, “absolutely gag a maggot.” (I am trusting his own brand of luridness to call me back from my inherent sentiment about him. Maybe that is a form of immortality—giving one’s survivors tools to avert their being overmaudlin in recalling oneself? I don’t know.) We all understood this much: Tad could really get his feelings hurt. He could become excessively silly at times, and you couldn’t pull him out of it, not even during emergencies. Once people crossed him or played dirty pool to cheat him out of some church he was trying to save, well, Tad never forgot. “They, my dear, are off Mother’s” (he sometimes comically referred to himself as “Mother”) “list, for good.” He either loved you or he really just didn’t.

  Once you were off “Mother’s list,” special pleading—be it Presidential, Papal, or from on high—couldn’t reinstate you, oh dear me no. All his own considerable skills (what a diplomat he would have made!) had long since been lined up and pressed toward one end—preserving what was old and handsome and in jeopardy. He’d given everything he owned away to save the beautiful and local.

  Plain obstinate selfishness baffled him. (There is, I hate to tell you, a lot of that around just now.) But every time Tad bumped into it, he seemed to find it brand-new. It could be a bore. He literally did not understand greed. “Why wouldn’t she give it away rather than see it torn down?” He sometimes made me feel guilty for how the very people I despised behaved!

  More than once, in our legal wrangling, we came up against some old person who would literally prefer to see his or her own family homeplace burn; better that than allow one Yankeefied stranger to set foot in it. This Tad puzzled over, as if he had heard wrong. “What?” he asked, and at times seemed to be blaming the messengers. In the face of such meanness, Tad himself grew obstinate and childlike; you saw he didn’t really want to know that part of people. How lucky that he saw as little of it as he did.

  There are about six Republican families, major landholders in our fine state, tribes he couldn’t abide; these were groups (nameless here, please) who could—with one phone call, or a signature—have spared the places he tried daily to preserve. They did not. They let treasure after treasure go. And they assumed nobody knew. Well, listen, if they’d half-guessed the social damage their own stinginess had done them and their climbing grandkids forever, they’d have handed Mr. Worth a stack of blank checks and just run.

  As with all people who’re obsessed, every turn of conversation led Tad back to the house he was just then trying to spare. He used to joke that perfect happiness would be to save the Shadowlawn Plantation down near Edenton (“my possible all-time fave”) and to lose that 15th midriff pound of his, and on the same day. He was always almost going on a diet, but only once he had sampled whatever it was that we were cooking. People did love feeding him. There was never a more appreciative eater of one’s work. Our leader claimed that his mother must’ve been a Jewish Mom switched at birth and uneasily disguised as a bony Episcopalian “who inherited only the garnets.” Tad claimed the first word he learned from her was “Eat.” And the second two were “Duncan Phyfe.” And it is a sad note to admit that, though he did finally gather contributors and grants enough to begin Shadowlawn’s “mere salvation,” he also lost more pounds than the anticipated 15.

  If I’d been told that, at my present age, I would feel fully at ease with computers, I would simply not have believed it. But here I am, facing a blue screen, writing this. I now possess copies of all the disks left in and near Tad’s laptop when he died. I scan through documents with a burgler’s guilty joy. It is a holy trust. It feels like continuing notes and mail from him. I cannot help—even if out of sequence—saving two things found there.

  First, he’d noted George Macdonald’s observation, “Home is the only place where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of, but the one place, if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.”

  In one file, I found the outtakes Tad had deleted from the Elkton Green description with which I opened. Coming on it filled me with such dread. I recalled the day I first understood that something was terribly wrong with Tad’s health, he who seemed a sort of Friar Tuck, invincible.

  Not two hours after the wedding ceased, newspaper accounts of the day tell how a young man carried his drowned bride one step at a time up onto the porch, moving slowly, bent across her, weeping like a child, moving toward the silenced father of Concord. The same mansion was still glowing golden, set there within spiders’ webbing that now ceased seeming whimsical, that now looked only, and ever after, sinister. As if inviting spiders to a wedding had meant, from the start, courting disaster.

  Pressing the Midas image forward to its usual end: Tragedy struck as it so often does when any person makes so spendthrift a display as had Caleb Coker. He felt he’d finally achieved his fondest wish, to build a house meant to contain the “wedding of the century.” Whenever anything we do drives us to say it is the whatever “Of the Century,” perhaps we should back off a bit. Our dearest wishes we must never utter quite aloud. The golden rice tossed, Concord’s trousseau had been loaded onto the roof of an enclosed carriage. Said conveyance was swagged of course in white satin ribbons and the gardenias she so loved. The horses were matched and extremely white. The travel to the train station would be but the shortest of jaunts. Not two miles from the spun-gold mansion—at what is still a difficult juncture of what’s even now a poorly planned twist where U.S. 40 meets U.S. 98 over the still-too-narrow Melius Bridge—the married couple’s coach driver, having imbibed many a celebratory rum toddy, misjudged that hairpin curve. The great weight of 12 steamer trunks strapped atop the vehicle caused it to tilt starboard and then wobble four inches off the Melius Bridge. Just one wheel slipped past its siding. But such was the weight of one father’s gifts, Concord’s new novels, unworn fineries, furs, the silver hairbrushes and mirror, that the whole wagon fell into what, just there, was but a shallow brook. Four white horses naturally followed. Concord had been seated on that side of the vehicle which struck rocks first, and she was either drowned or crushed by the bulk of her unasked-for luxuries. Her young husband survived. Contemporary accounts never fail to sketch—with that day’s love of melodrama and stagy tableaux—the inevitable final scene. Caleb Coker was now supervising the exquisite comedy of his slaves, 20, armed with butterfly nets trying to recapture the rental spiders, themselves long since powdered gold. (You can survive that and even safely eat gold dust in small amounts, as the vulgar 1980s party-food vogue in Japan and Manhattan makes clear.)

  Contemporary accounts insist that the bridegroom, himself unscratched during the dreadful mishap, caught a ride on the first vehicle to chance past the broken bridge railing. And while the country crowd yet waded in the river’s shallows to fish out silks and the drunken coachman, one black farmer, guiding his mule cart, deposited the groom at the curb of a brilliant home still festive. The orchestra played even better, now that most guests were gone. Up there on Elkton Green’s great gallery porch, Caleb Coker was yet visible, continuing to offer and accept champagne toasts, laughing, flipping a gold piece to the slave who’d caught the largest spider fastest. When up the carpet toward Elkton Green, his wet shoes leaving traces, came the bridegroom, bearing in his arms the body of Concord.

  Imagining the moment when the girl’s doting and ecstatic father first caught sight of his only child, dead … it remains unimaginable. No, not quite unimaginable …

  I’m struck again by what a religious nature young Mr. Worth had. I simply mean he wasn’t simply anecdotal; he believed in more than experience, far more than mortal brick and mortal mortar and English boxwoods that grow only a half-inch a year, which simply makes your bigger bushes mean more. It all implied a sort of “belief system,” as my son who did Divinity School might say.

  Maybe this explained why, as an adult, Tad lived in that comfortable but perfectly ordinary little cottage built in the ’40s, the 1940s. It was really fairly spare, the way he lived. Tad never acted happier than when he was in one of the properties that he himself, with all his wiles and charms, had saved. But he didn’t yet feel quite entitled to occupy one himself. Maybe that’s why the older houses were so free in revealing their secrets to him. Safe to ’fess up their former family problems—safe, their offered news, preserved with him. He saved face for real estate, a sort of go-between for occupants living and dead, as I shall demonstrate in a bit.

  As I stated, he attended the University of Virginia. He worked each summer as a day-labor gardener on the grounds of Monticello.

  Tad claimed that, in the household’s former vegetable patch, they were forever tilling up weather gauges or oxidized iron yardsticks, 18th-century glass beakers drilled with holes. Science was a cottage industry there. It reached Tad so clearly and daily that Jefferson’s whole enterprise had been an experiment, a tester’s waystation. And, in later talks, Tad would mention this vision of Democracy as a series of go-for-broke if scientifically observed risk-takings. Pushed far enough, these make Democracy theological, not just coolly rational. Jefferson’s quest to understand some Divine Master-Scheme presupposes one. It assumes some ferocious Palladian blueprint, a golden mean of absolute proportion underwriting all our messy doings and our failed designs. Just such striving and good faith shaped the Federal buildings Tad loved best, their symmetry and modesty, their frontal candor, almost virginal.

  Tad Worth’s relation to Jefferson became immediate for many of us locals. There is a handsome illustrated volume called Mr. Jefferson in Motion: A Documentary Biography in His Own Words. I’m told that the book is still in print; it is by one Jean Garth Randolph. One photo’s caption reads: “Contemporary Model wears a favorite red under-waistcoat owned by Jefferson circa 1800–1820. Silk crepe with brown velvet collar, woolen sleeves, and a lining consisting of cut-apart knotted cotton and wool fleece stockings, upper back embroidered ‘TJ. Monticello.’” And there, in three-quarters profile, his long auburnish hair tied back with a black grosgrain ribbon in the simplest revolutionary manner, stands Tad. Nineteen if unsmiling, he’s still recognizable; but he looks like some overpretty Renaissance page of about 12. Of course, he was shorter than Jefferson’s six three or, some claim, four. Still, there is our boy, on record.

  “Puttin’ on Marse Tom’s gear, that’s my Tidewater idea of real high cotton.” But Tad always refused to look at his own printed image. For a while, that big book was on absolutely everybody’s end table.

  Tad once confessed to me, while half tipsy, that he had—as an under-grad history major—overstepped traditional respectfulness at Monticello. He’d been helping to catalogue Jefferson’s remaining clothes. “I knew that traces of his DNA (not to mention plain ole man-sweat) must still be soaked into one of those outsized white linen nightshirts he most wore when he was around 35, and incidentally writing the Declaration. So, one rainy afternoon, once all the nice docent ladies tripped upstairs for tea, I stayed on. First I sniffed Jefferson’s white shirt. Eyes closed, I admitted I could smell mainly only basement—just time. So it was then, Mary Ellen, when I couldn’t scent him, I decided I’d better taste it. Just to make sure. I soon pressed my li’l mouth to the underarm of that fine linen, and before you could say ‘1776,’ I was just suckling like a kitten.” He grew oddly bashful, he hushed. And that made me come right out and ask, “What did … ?” (I knew how far I’d come when I allowed myself to articulate this…. I feared I was about to learn more than someone of my age, upbringing, and conventional beliefs strictly needed to know. But I had asked, hadn’t I?)

  “What did it … he taste like? you were wondering aloud, were you, darlin’ M.E.?” Tad actually made me nod then; nothing would do but that I become his Compleat Conspirator! Finally, a sly smile, and Tad’s lips smacked, recalling. I saw a dreamy, lit-up carnal Cheshire-cat grin begin as our friend bent nearer my good ear. He whispered, “I’d say … the great one’s flavor was funky if semi-steely—busy, a bit overly Scottish, but ver’ ver’ salty. Naturally athletic. All too mortal, all too real. I mean, of course, all too male. But mainly Jefferson tasted … mmm … preoccupied.”