Margaret Nguyen

Spouse of Marcus Chandler Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Margaret Nguyen was born in 1958 at Corpus Christi, Texas, and is living today in the same city, where she retired after a long career as a bookkeeper in the oil offices of Houston. She is not of any house of the Ledger. The family papers enter her as unaffiliated, a woman who came to the White Ledger through marriage and who has served it, for more than forty years, in the single capacity in which a bookkeeper can serve anything, by making the figures come out. In 1979 she married the high school coach Marcus Chandler Proctor, the elder son of the electrician James Proctor and the hospital cook Mildred Chandler, of the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. They have no children. She has never been a vampire slayer, carried no alias and learned no craft but double entry, and she has been, in the family's own words, the most dangerous person at any table when the question is whether a cousin's expenses add up. She came into the world in a wet March in a small house near the shrimp docks, the daughter of a ship's cook from the old Saigon river trade who had left a French freighter at Corpus Christi in the early fifties because he liked the bay and a girl at the cannery, and of the girl, a Tejana from the cannery floor who could pack eight hundred shrimp an hour and laughed, her daughter said, like a hinge. There were few Nguyens in the Texas of those years, and their house was an unlikely mixture of fish sauce, tortillas and the Methodist hymnal. Margaret was named by the cannery girl, who had admired a schoolteacher called Margaret, and she was the first person in the family to be born with a birth certificate that no one had to explain. She grew up on the bay, among the seawall, the fish market and the freighters, in a household that spoke English at the table and two other languages in the kitchen, and she was early known as the child who could count. At seven she was keeping the tally at the dock, with a pencil behind her ear, of the crates that went by the window of her father's galley. At twelve she kept her father's books for the small cannery and found, with a tact that shocked the owner, that he was short by two hundred dollars a year in a drawer he had not examined. She was in Corpus Christi, in the summer of 1976, when she met Marcus. He was fifteen. He had been sent for the holiday to stay with his grandmother, Mildred's mother, the church cook, a few streets from the Nguyen house, and he had been told to be useful. The grandmother had put him to work stacking chairs in the church hall. Margaret, who was eighteen, was running the church's accounts for the summer fund, and found that the boy was keeping a count on his own account of every chair he stacked. She told him that he had missed four. He said that they were folding chairs and the count was approximate. She said that a chair was a chair. He came back the next summer, and the next, and he was, by the second, six feet tall and had a whistle, a coach's whistle that he had bought with his own money and wore on a string. She said that she had never in her life met anyone so frightened of being late. They were married in 1979, in the same church hall, with the chairs stacked by the wall and Mildred Chandler, the groom's mother, in the front row in her best hat, with a pot of beans in the car. He was eighteen. She was twenty-one. The cannery girl, who was by then the mother of the bride, cried through the vows, and Mildred, who had brought tissues, passed her one. They went to Houston that autumn. He had a place in a south-side school as a junior coach, and she took the first job that a girl with a bookkeeping certificate could get, which was in the counting room of an oilfield supply company on Richmond Avenue, where she kept the accounts of three hundred wells and the petty cash of eleven geologists. It was a good place. In 1981 she moved to a larger firm of the same kind, in a glass tower on Louisiana Street, with a view of the ship channel, and she stayed in the Houston oil offices for thirty-one years, in six firms and four towers, learning that every oil company is a set of figures that someone has agreed to believe. Her mother-in-law, Mildred, told her the secret of the family over a pot of rice on the second Sunday of the marriage, and Margaret asked whether the family kept books. She was told that it kept one book, the White Ledger, and that it was rather out of date. She offered to look at it. She was shown the page of the Texas cousins for 1952, where the totals for a flood year did not agree, and she found, in forty minutes, that a cousin had written a nine as a four. The cousins had been arguing about it for twenty-seven years. She was, in the following decades, the bookkeeper of the Gulf coast cousins, in her spare hours. She never carried a pistol. She kept the accounts for the hunters who came through the channel, the fund for the widows, the safe house on the bayou and the modest quarterly bill of the funeral director at Pasadena. In the early eighties, when the oil bust of 1982 and 1986 emptied the towers and the whole of the oil country went quiet, she lost her job twice, in each case on a Friday, and was re-employed the following Tuesday by a rival firm that had noted her work. She took the loss of a position as a bookkeeper takes a negative entry, with a ruler. When the family's finances, in the worst of those years, came very near to running dry, she moved the Ledger's few savings out of the bank that was to fail into a credit union in Corpus Christi, and the bank failed on the following Monday. She never mentioned it. The cousins, who found out in 1987, sent a ham. The attacks of September 2001 came on a Tuesday morning, when she was on the thirty-third floor of a tower on Louisiana Street, balancing the month's accounts, and she was one of the six thousand who were sent home by noon. She spent the afternoon at the school where her husband coached, in the gymnasium, with the students who could not reach their parents, and kept their names on a list, as she kept all lists, until the last was collected. Marcus said that it was the quietest he had ever seen a room full of seventeen-year-olds. She left the oil business in 2012, with a gold watch and a stern note about the pension, and went home to Corpus Christi. She says that it was for the sake of her husband's mother, Mildred, who was then seventy-five and living alone near the seawall and who had refused every offer of help, and she took a house three streets from hers, with a lemon tree, and did her accounts at the kitchen table. Marcus, who has the team to coach and a school in Galveston that will not release him, drives down for the long weekends and holidays and, in the summers, stays for a month. They are still married, and the arrangement is looked on by the family as a very modest triumph. She sees Mildred twice a day. She is sixty-eight, the keeper of three ledgers, the church fund, the Texas cousins and her mother-in-law's recipe box, and a great many people owe her money who have forgotten that they do. Margaret Nguyen is remembered in the Proctor family as the bookkeeper of the Gulf coast, the woman who found the nine that was written as a four and kept the White Ledger's money safe through two busts. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of accounts who never took the field and who knew that a hunt is paid for in dollars and cents as well as in nerve, and that someone must sit up with the figures until they agree.