Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “You can say that again,” Rebecca said.

  “Anyway, this generation of women works. And not necessarily because they want to.” Another pearl of genius from me, but people said vapid things to each other just to put the other at ease.

  “You can say that again too!” Rebecca said.

  I took the plate from Huey and eyeballed this diminutive Rebecca, thinking that if she agreed to agree with every word I spoke, then surely there was an exalted position available for her in our little tribe.

  If that sounds egotistical, let’s get something straight right now. The last thing I needed in my life or even in the periphery of my life was someone telling me I was wrong, what was wrong with my politics, what was wrong with the world. I knew what was wrong with the world. Everything. I had seen enough of what people did to each other and I just didn’t want to deal with it for the foreseeable future.

  “So where are you from?” I said.

  “Charleston,” she said. “I came up here to see if I could sell some of my work.”

  “Abigail. Look at this.”

  Huey had closed her portfolio so that a flying crumb of tuna or a splotch of mayonnaise wouldn’t ruin anything, but he reached down and pulled up one of her paintings. He flipped back the parchment paper cover and there it was: the classic watercolor of two children, a boy and a girl, playing by the edge of the shore on a beach. I had seen hundreds of them, and all of them were cures for insomnia.

  But this one was profoundly different. The sky and the water looked as radiantly alive as the sandpipers pecking the wet sand and then running from the waves. But the children, their backs to the viewer, seemed to be a thousand miles away. And you got the sense that while they were probably siblings, that they didn’t want to play together or that they were tremendously unhappy for some inexplicable reason and preferred to live in their misery alone. The scene was haunting and bothersome, but I couldn’t stop looking at them. I wanted to rush inside the painting and save them. I turned and looked at Rebecca.

  “It’s very powerful,” I said.

  “Children aren’t always happy, are they?” she said.

  “No, they are not.”

  “Rebecca, darling? We have a show opening tomorrow and I was just thinking…”

  “Huey!” I said. “Her work isn’t framed, and besides…”

  “Oh! Gosh!” Rebecca said. “I can make frames if you have the material…”

  “Rebecca? Sweetheart? You make frames?”

  “Yes, in fact, I am told that, well, I’m rather good at it. I mean, well, I don’t mean to brag…”

  “Stop! Humility is unflattering, especially for an artist of your talent! You need some attitude, girl! Seriously!”

  We all had a giggle at that, but Huey was right. This mouse had to stop squeaking.

  “Huey, I…”

  I was trying to speak, but when Huey got his engine in gear, there was no stopping him.

  “Sweetheart. You finish up your sandwich, and then I want you to have a look around in the storage room. There’s enough material back there to hang a frame around Georgetown County, including the new waterslide at Myrtle Beach.”

  Huey sniffed and I knew it was because of the waterslides, putt-putt courses and all manner of NASCAR contraptions that had been erected under the guise of entertainment but reeked of crass commercialism. And that, my friends, was the scathing difference between genteel plantation living, the arrogant shabby of Pawleys Island and the wild consumerism of Myrtle Beach. All that said for the antielitist dart throwers in the crowd, Huey the King Snob liked nothing better than a round of putt-putt followed by a snow cone dripping in tutti-frutti syrup.

  “The former framer was recently relieved of his duties,” I said, thinking I would speak to him when Rebecca was out of earshot.

  “I fired the nitwit,” Huey said. “What a pathetic simpleton! He drove me crazy. Didn’t he ever hear of measure twice, cut once?”

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  Inside of a minute, Rebecca, who was slightly confused as to why she should inspect the inventory of framing materials when she had come to Huey’s gallery to sell her work, balled up the remains of her turkey sandwich and went to the storage room to sniff around like a good dog.

  “So what do you think?” Huey said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Huey Flagg Valentine! I think that Sallie Anne Wood will definitely scratch your eyes out! I know I would! You can’t promise someone a one-woman show and then just sort of casually have another show going on at the same time! It’s unethical!”

  The opening, which was the following evening, was a one-woman show for Sallie Anne Wood, an established egomaniacal diva artist from Charleston.

  “Listen to me, Abigail Thurmond. Sallie Anne Wood has had a thousand shows. She’ll sell enough to make her happy tomorrow night. Right? Look. I cannot resist Rebecca’s work! I don’t know why, but I sense an urgency in Rebecca and I think she needs us. I mean, you must agree, Rebecca’s work is rather astounding.”

  “It is that.”

  “God! I wonder what she could do in oil! She’d be biblical! Rebecca at the Well! Great thundering Zeus! I remember that from the show at the Chagall Museum in Nice. Women of the Old Testament! Matriarchs in Search of Motherhood! I wish you had been with me then…”

  “Me too. Huey? This is still a problem, you know. You cannot possibly expect Sallie Anne to walk in here and be happy to see Rebecca’s work hanging in the same gallery on the same night as her opening! And, Huey, I know you would not enjoy the cognizi of Litchfield and Pawleys calling you an opportunist, now would you?”

  “I can sell everything Rebecca can paint. Every blessed last piece. And you know it.”

  “Framed or unframed. But, Huey? Darlin’, we hardly know this child! Are you hiring her to be our new framer? She’s an artist, for heaven’s sake! Don’t you think she will be insulted?”

  “I’m going to ask her if she’ll be the assistant manager of my gallery.”

  “And who is the manager? You?”

  “Okay! I’ll make her the manager! Happy?”

  “Oh, Huey, Huey, Huey. If you really want this puppy, then I know you’ll have this puppy one way or another. Lord help Rebecca! She’s falling down the rabbit hole and doesn’t even know it.”

  TWO

  MEET MISS OLIVIA

  MY darling son, Huey, bought me a corsage to wear to his opening tonight. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s old hat to wear a corsage these days, so I made him a boutonniere. I picked one perfect gardenia from my own garden, added a sprig of rosemary and wound them together with florist’s tape. When I pinned it to his lapel I confess that I became a little weepy, remembering all the times I had pinned them to my late husband Chalmers’s lapel, and, oh well, he’s been dead for a thousand years and who cares about that anymore? Life goes on whether you like it or not.

  The reason I chose a gardenia was because Huey is so sweet, but the rosemary is to remind him to never forget to love his mother. You know, in Victorian times, brides would give rosemary sprigs to all their family and friends. Even though she was leaving to start a new life, a sprig of rosemary let them know she would never forget them. Don’t ask me who started that bit of foolishness. I simply couldn’t tell you. There are so many traditions to honor that it just wears me out.

  The reason I was looking forward to this opening was that I was to meet the young woman Huey has been raving about, this girl Rebecca, an artist from Charleston. Huey hired her just like that! Doesn’t even know who her people are! It just seems to me that when you have someone handling your money, you should know all about them. But that’s my boy. He gets an idea that he wants thus and so to be thus and so and the next thing you know, it’s thus and so. In all my eighty-four years, I have never met another man so determined to have his own way. All right, eighty-six years, and it’s no one’s business.

  My job tonight is to get the poop on Rebecca because my Huey can’t
stop flitting around long enough to do it himself. He’s just like a bumblebee in a garden of blooms, darting from one budding beauty to the next. Ah well, that little weakness in his deportment is also why he’s so good at selling paintings. Huey just loves people and artists most especially. Probably because, and I mean this in the most charitable way, it’s all my Huey can do to draw his breath! Oh, Lordy! That’s a little art joke, you know.

  After I looked at all the paintings, I had to agree with Huey’s enthusiasm for Rebecca’s work. Poor Sallie Anne Wood was sure to have a pebble in her shoe when she arrived and saw Rebecca’s paintings all hung in the framing area. Huey was clever to install them in the rear of his gallery, well distanced from the show he had put up for Miss Wood. But even though he had repainted the front walls in Ralph Lauren’s new ivory metallic paint and had special lighting adjusted for each of Miss Wood’s canvases, it just didn’t help one fig. Miss Wood was a fine painter, a competent artist to be sure, but Lord have mercy, did the world need another painting of a beach path with palmettos?

  Rebecca’s watercolors grabbed you and held you. Period. End of story. And Sallie Anne Wood’s work was lovely but it would never keep you up at night. Well, I hoped there wouldn’t be a catfight between the two of them. You know how artists can be. I would simply flatter Miss Wood to pieces when she arrived and hope for the best.

  So after I had my little tour, Huey and Byron, his houseman, propped me up here in this chair like the reigning queen. I don’t like to get knocked around, and heaven knows, there must be two hundred people expected here tonight. Why in the world I would want to meet all these people eludes me, but Huey insists that I am his good luck charm, so I haven’t missed an opening since he started up this business. I try to be gracious, but so many people! It is a little annoying, and besides, these days I feel a little more tired. I keep telling him that my get up and go got up and went. He just smiles and asks me what color my dress is going to be so he can go waste his money on another corsage.

  It certainly would be nice to have a little something to drink.

  I turned to see Huey approaching with a young woman on his arm. It had to be Rebecca, so I sat up straight and smiled to meet her while giving her the once-over in a way that could not be detected as a once-over.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “This is Rebecca Simms. Rebecca, this is my mother, Miss Olivia.”

  “Well! I am so pleased to know you,” I said. “Huey has told me all about you.”

  “And he’s told me all about you! I am so happy to meet you too.”

  I took her hand and held it for a few moments. She did seem like a very nice person, so tiny, like a Dresden figurine. She had a nice watch and no manicure.

  “Huey? Be a dear and bring your mother a little glass of sherry, won’t you? Then I can have a few minutes with Rebecca. Come sit by me!”

  Rebecca smiled, sat down, and Huey winked at me as he walked away.

  “Now, then. Tell me all about yourself! Where are your parents from?”

  “My parents? Oh! Um, Manning. My family is from Manning. My father was a farmer—cotton and soybeans—and my mother, well, I didn’t know my mother very well.”

  “Oh! I am so sorry. Was she ill? Did she pass away at a young age?” I took the glass from Huey, thanked him and fastened my attention on Rebecca’s face. She had very pretty blue eyes, and if she tweezed her eyebrows, one might even notice them.

  “So that’s pretty much the story about my mother,” she said.

  “Oh! I’m sorry, dear. You’ll have to pardon me. I was just thinking you had the prettiest blue eyes I’ve seen in many a day. Yes, you do. Now please indulge me and tell me again about your mother.”

  Well, don’t you know she told me that her mother had stayed on her father’s farm just long enough to get her out of diapers? She left town with a cigarette salesman and ran off to Spartanburg and then Santa Fe, New Mexico. It broke her father’s heart but at least the hussy had the consideration to leave a pantry filled with hundreds of mason jars of bottled string beans, corn, tomatoes, chow chow, bread-and-butter pickles and two kinds of jam—peach and strawberry. Her mother died of a lady cancer before Rebecca was twelve, not that she ever did the poor child a lick of good as a role model, and her death? Well, it served her right. Jezebel.

  “My! Goodness! Gracious sakes alive! Some people in this world…” I just shook my head and she nodded in agreement.

  “It’s the truth. I don’t know how some people live with themselves.”

  “So then your daddy raised you?”

  “Well, I guess, but my grandparents moved in and helped. They were wonderful people. My daddy worked by his father’s side every day, and then there was a drought that lasted for four or five years. Daddy saw that he couldn’t support us with what the farm was bringing in, so he quit farming and rented the land to somebody else. Finally, my granddaddy retired and my daddy opened up a Tastee-Freez and ran it for years. He would laugh and say there was more money in corn dogs and push-ups than there was in a zillion acres of cotton.”

  “And he never married again?”

  “No. No, he didn’t. I think he was so embarrassed by what Momma did that he swore off women forever. Manning is a pretty small town, you know.”

  “Yes, but it’s so lovely. I can remember trips with Chalmers, going up Highway 301 when all the wisteria was in bloom…It was just breathtaking.”

  “Yes. It still is, I imagine.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “You are a very talented painter. I’d wager a bet that every single one of your paintings walks right out the door tonight. When Sallie Anne Wood gets here and sees them she’s going to, well, the poor dear. Let’s just be very nice to her.”

  “Don’t worry, Miss Olivia, I’ll just reach down in my psychoanalytic bag of tricks and fix her right up!”

  “What? Psychoanalytic bag of tricks? Whatever do you mean, child?”

  “Oh, a thousand years ago, I got my Ph.D. in psychology from Carolina. I worked in HR for Wal-Mart for a year, but then I married Nat and the babies started to come and that all went out the window…You know what I mean?”

  “Rebecca? Would you mind refilling my glass? I am so parched tonight!”

  “Oh! I’m sorry! I should’ve noticed!”

  She hopped up and left me in a dither. HR? Who was Nat? What babies? Huey told me she was living in a condo at Litchfield Beach! He didn’t say a word about her having a husband and family. Had she run off and left them like her mother did? I reached in my purse for a mint and tried to compose myself. I knew I was getting worked up and even though that fool doctor at the Medical University in Charleston said I was fit as a fiddle, I knew that getting riled wasn’t good for my heart. Mercy! A husband and children! Do you see what I mean about my Huey? She might be a good painter, but she also might go crazy and shoot the place up! Oh! My stars, Olivia! The girl’s not a crazy person! Yes, I had developed the unattractive habit of talking to myself out loud, but you can tell me about it when you’ve reached my age and not before. Now, where was I? Well, here she comes with my drink and it was time for me to gather myself together and get to the bottom of it.

  “Oh, thank you, Rebecca!” It looked like she was going to leave again so I said, “Now sit here with me for few minutes.”

  “Actually, Byron wanted me to help him.”

  I patted the seat and she sat.

  “Let him open all the wine bottles himself! That’s what he gets paid for! I want to hear about your husband and children. Are they here with you at Litchfield?”

  “No. Oh, Miss Olivia, it’s a long and complicated story and I don’t think you would really want to hear it. Honestly.”

  “Rebecca? I am so glad I still have my hearing that I’d listen to a politician! And let me tell you this. At my age, I have heard just about every story there is to tell. You cannot shock me.” I put my drink down on the table and folde
d my hands in my lap, indicating that I expected to hear her full story.

  “I feel awful that I might burden you with my mess on a night like this.”

  “Come on now, I’m not getting any younger.”

  “Well, all right then.” She took a deep breath and blurted it all out at once. “Just ten days ago, the day after my children left for their summer camps, I was served with a summons for divorce and a complaint alleging that I was an unfit mother. The next week I found myself in court and the judge granted full custody of the children and the house to Nat. So I packed up my watercolors, which Nat and the children made fun of all the time, and came to Litchfield to stay in my friend’s condo until I could get my brains together. That’s the story. The kids are in camp, Nat’s in the house and I’m here.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, her chin began to quiver and her eyes became bloodshot and watery. She didn’t make a single sound, but the tears spilled over her eyelids in a flood, washing right down her face and neck. My heart just sank. I felt like crying too. It was inconceivable that this talented, soft-spoken, genteel woman before me was an unfit mother. She was a precious girl and that man of hers had done her dirty. And why had I made her reveal herself? Oh! Sometimes I was so nosy. There I had been thinking that she was going to swindle my Huey and the fact was that she had been swindled out of her own home and children. I reached in my purse and handed her my handkerchief.

  “Thank you. I’m so sorry. I just don’t know why or how it even happened. I never saw it coming. One day I was sewing name tags in my children’s socks and the next day I was…my whole life was gone.”

  She took a long breath and I wondered what in the world I could say to her. There had to be more to the story. I knew that much. I felt perfectly wretched.

  “Rebecca. Dear child. You must say that you will forgive me. I am so deeply sorry that I pried into your personal life. I had no right to do it. And I had no idea you had suffered such a tragedy. I just wanted to know who you were. Now, you go wash your face and let’s just forget about our discussion for the rest of the night.”