by David Payne
Ran dropped off his prescription at the CVS, and when he returned, Claire and the children—who’d picked up T-bones and instant mac and cheese next door—were working out to Marvin Gaye. When Ran heard Charlie belting out the Hooked on Phonics version of “Sexual Healing,” he laughed aloud.
“In fifteen years, they’ll be telling this one on the couch for sure,” he said, slipping behind the wheel.
“You don’t end up on the couch for that.” Claire nodded to the rearview, and, together, as they hadn’t been in quite a while, they contemplated their offspring cutting loose. Ran picked up the jewel case.
“So, Marvin G…I guess you’ve been warming up for my arrival.”
“I’ve been warming up,” Claire said. “But who says for you?” She poked her tongue into her cheek, and her eyes flashed, toying with him now.
Ran’s gaze narrowed a degree. “What’s this new je ne sais quoi, DeLay? You seem different.”
She flushed at the acknowledgment and looked away. “Not different so much as…”
“As?”
“Getting back to who I used to be.”
“Hey, seems to me, I remember her.” He smiled and put the key in the ignition. “That chick.”
Claire’s gaze, limpid now and bright, rested on his; then she reached out and straightened his collar, allowed her knuckles to graze his cheek. Something in Ransom soared, and, turning off the highway, he joined them on the chorus.
…when I get that feeling
I want sexual healing—sexual healing
The words flowed back into the slipstream, and for twenty minutes, as they shot through the blue Carolina afternoon, happiness was with them, like a fifth, completing presence in the car, a familiar stranger Ran had lately doubted he would ever see again.
They took 701 twelve miles inland toward Planterville, a tunnel, ribbon-straight and flat, through walls of pine and cypress forest, broken occasionally by marsh and estuary, gold-and-silver-spangled black this time of day.
It was coming on to dusk by the time he turned into the allée of ancient water oaks. Three-quarters of a mile long, there were over a hundred trees on either side, like deposed gods from some old pantheon, brooding wrongs the wider world had moved on from.
A cool exhalation from the river, not quite mist, further softened the soft light as the car moved up the potholed, sandy drive under heavy branches draped with Spanish moss where cicadas whirred. The whole scene possessed a riverine lushness composed of countless shades of green, and at the end of the tunnel of great trees, the house sat like a sepia-toned visitation from an old daguerreotype set down in the middle of a modern color photograph.
Wando Passo was none of the things Ransom had expected on his first visit, when Clive DeLay—Claire’s vindictive, jolly, aquiline-nosed uncle—was still alive. “The true old Carolina style,” Clive jeeringly explained—after ascertaining, in a quarter of a minute, everything he cared to know about Claire’s rock star husband—“wasn’t Tara, wasn’t Greek Revival, wasn’t elegant and white. What it was was this.” And his eyes—his bright, narrow, happy, entitled, avian old eyes—seemed to Ran to gloat: “And it belonged to us, not you, you ill-bred North Carolina cracker.” Clive was in the backyard now, taking his dirt nap beneath the cypress tree by the black pond with all the other dead DeLays, but Ran still sometimes felt he was here on sufferance, at the master’s—now the mistress’s—whim.
Under a tin hipped roof with six crumbling chimneys sticking out, what Wando Passo really was was a giant unpainted saltbox, a saltbox of seven thousand square feet and fifteen rooms. Massive and faintly carious, with the occasional window missing where symmetry demanded it, others where no Crayola-toting five-year-old with an ounce of self-respect would have placed them, the house was like a great ambition marred by insufficient planning and excess afterthought. At ground level, a wide porch elled around two sides under a shed roof. Its exposed rafters were supported not by columns, but by simple posts whose sole detail was a chamfered edge, irregularly cut with foot-adzes by the old slave carpenters who hewed them out of native cypress logs hauled up by mule team from the swamp.
Inside, though, despite a half century’s neglect, the house revealed its charms. The foyer cut up through two stories. Hung on fifty pounds of sterling links, the massive crystal chandelier was framed by a horseshoe staircase. Along its two curved walls, the paneling was faux-painted to resemble verde marble, and stepped above the rails were portraits of Claire’s ancestors, old planters of rice and, before that, of indigo, in crimson British uniforms, powdered wigs, silk hose, with silver buckles on their shoes.
A spacious center hall with three large rooms on either side led to the kitchen. Claire took the kids out back as Ran unwrapped the steaks in one of the deep bays of the old rust-spotted enamel sink that dated—like the pearl-tone Formica and the Frigidaire, with its heavy nickel latch and hinges and the top compartment made to hold a block of ice—from Clive’s renovation in the thirties. Overhead, the dusty chandelier harked back to a still more distant era, when the room had been a parlor and the kitchen house had been somewhere out there in the yard where Ransom headed now.
On his way, he left the check at Claire’s place on the table, smoothing it over the rough old heart pine planks.
“Look at this a minute, Ran, would you?” Claire said as he poured charcoal in the grill.
Brushing his hands, he joined her where she stood, arms akimbo, frowning at a boil of rot that had erupted in a foundation timber on the river side. Ran squatted on his hams and palpated a discolored patch of paint. The wood around the sore was punky and unsolid. When he poked, his index finger sank fist-knuckle deep.
He looked up, wiping mildewed wood pulp on his pants.
“Not good,” she surmised.
He shook his head. “You’ve got a rotten sill.”
“Just tell me how much it’s going to cost.”
“If it’s gone, a fair amount,” he said, standing up again. “They’ll have to jack this bad boy up and—”
Hearing him begin to wax enthusiastic, she held a hand up like a cop. “Stop. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“The core may still be solid, though,” he repented. “I’ll check it when there’s better light.”
“Well, unless the house is going to fall down on our heads,” she said, starting off, “it’s going to have to wait until I start my job.”
“Maybe not…”
She turned.
“I left something for you inside on the table.”
Her stare interrogated him, but Ransom, under pressure, didn’t break. “I guess I’ll see about that grill.”
In the first whoosh of exploding fire as Ransom tossed the match, he saw an ant, a large black one, crawling across a pale expanse of trodden clay. Dancing from the Weber’s cauldron, the tall blue flames revealed another, and another, a whole line marching across the lawn, flanked by their distorted, much larger shadows. Following them in the direction of the graveyard, Ransom, halfway there, came to a patch of old-growth periwinkle, where the tiny regiment vanished into cover. With the insole of his boot, he brushed the greenery aside. The earth within had been milled into friable red grains, the telltale sign. Trying to ascertain the colony’s extent, he waded deeper. The ground turned spongy underfoot. Feeling his way gingerly, his boot struck something solid, upright, like a stob. Squatting on his hams, Ran swept aside the leaves and looked. Protruding from the ground was what appeared at first to be a nub of upthrust tree root, possibly a surveyor’s pin. In the failing light, it was impossible to make it out. Touching it, he felt a shock. “Shit! The damn thing’s hot!” he said, reverting to old habits from the cab.
As he rubbed his hand and looked, Ran noticed smoke rising from the ground around him, a thin, subtle cloud, drifting over the periwinkle in the direction of the river. Suddenly, a boat horn blew.
“What the hell…” Startled, he fell over on his seat.
At that moment, he heard
the fluttering of wings and looked up to see a flock of birds passing up where afternoon preserved a late, last note of blue. Wheeling in dark formation, they threw their shadow earthward as they went, creating the illusion. Trying to make out what they were, Ran watched them drift eastward in a twittering green cloud. Shelving his eyes, he stared toward the river, waiting for the boat to come around the bend. A beat passed. Then another. Ransom, as he waited, could feel his heartbeat pounding out a heavy klaxon in his chest.
THREE
In the Nina’s bows, Addie, with the breeze of the boat’s headway blowing her loose hair, watches six black oarsmen in a lighter off the starboard side put their backs into the strokes, redoubling their efforts as the little steamer overtakes them.
“Look, Aunt Blanche, they’re racing us—isn’t it lovely!” She points with the hand that holds her book—a new edition of Byron, in red morocco, picked up at Russell’s for the trip. In the excitement, she has yet to cut the pages….
Last evening, as they crossed the bar at Charleston, the Niagara fired across the bow, and all night long, as the crew tumbled casks and bales into the sea, the big Federal frigate gave chase—so close at times, Addie could hear the creaking of the warship’s masts. Today, just at dawn, the Nina slipped, safe, into Winyah Bay.
Addie barely closed her eyes, and her first encounter with the Pee Dee has ravished her so wholly that her beloved Byron has received short shrift.
“Oh, and listen…Listen, Aunt Blanche.” Now she holds a finger up.
Above the engine and the rush of wind, the song drifts up:
In case I never see you anymo’
I hope to meet on Canaan’s happy sho’….
Addie’s eyes, which are blue and mobile, showing every change of mood or thought, film with happiness as she looks at her aunt, who stands holding down her bonnet, under stress from the dazzle of sunlight on black water, from the fresh, raw wind.
“Yes, dear, but sparks…The smoke is blowing toward us.” Blanche eyes the imported silk of Addie’s dress regretfully. From Mrs. Cummings’s shop on Meeting Street, the centerpiece of the trousseau, it is pale blue to match her niece’s eyes, with darker horizontal stripes to bring them out, a style called bayadere, all the rage this winter past, the gayest social season anybody can remember, with a Secession ball or supper every week, a Secession something somewhere every night. “And your hair, Addie…Please come in before we have to hire a team of mules and drag a hay rake through your hair.”
“Do I look a fright?” she asks, laughing as she touches it. “I’m sure I must. But, oh, Aunt Blanche, I feel happy. Have you ever seen such a sky? If you struck it with a mallet, it looks as though it just might ring. And, look, the birds!” she cries now, pointing, as a sudden flock swoops down. “They’re racing, too! What are they? Are they the ones that Nellie makes?”
“No, dear, those are bobolinks,” Blanche answers. “These are green. I don’t know what they are.”
“Maybe it’s an omen!”
“A good one, let us pray.”
“I’m sure it is,” says the new bride. “Seeing this, I feel it will all come right. It must. It simply shall, Aunt Blanche.”
“I hope so, dear,” says Blanche, with notably less enthusiasm than her niece. “Though I can’t speak from personal experience, Addie, I’ve seen many marriages that start in passion come to bad results, while those built on prudence and good sense endure and thrive. Though Harlan isn’t whom I would have chosen for you once upon a time, you and he are well matched in several ways.”
“You’re right, Aunt Blanche, we are. And I thank you for all you’ve done. You’ve been both mother and father to me.”
“Dear girl.”
As the women press each other’s hands, Addie looks at Blanche’s face, at what is circumscribed and fearful there, put out by last night’s events and the disruption of routine this trip upriver represents—at what is afraid, essentially, of life—and it strikes her how narrowly she has escaped this fate. And that she has escaped it is due, in no small part, to Blanche herself.
Both the birds and the oarsmen have disappeared now, and Addie’s face, in contemplation, as she stares after them into the wake, takes on a melancholy cast.
When she first came out in society, she was courted by Paul Hayne, a poet who has now achieved a minor fame, yet when he proposed, she turned him down. And why? Because when Addie searched her heart at seventeen, she couldn’t say she loved Paul in the way Evangeline loved Gabriel Lajeunesse in Longfellow’s poem, which she first read at Mme. Togno’s school, in the dear old double house on Tradd Street two doors east of Meeting, where Addie walked each morning from her aunt’s. She felt certain then that such love—love like Evangeline’s, that would be proof against the power of distance, time, and even Death—would come to her; it seemed impossible that it should not. And as Addie waited for her Gabriel—like Sleeping Beauty for the prince—one season became two; two turned, suddenly, to ten, and she had passed, without perceiving any inward change, from debutante to the succeeding stage in the female life cycle that in Charleston is euphemized as “chaperone.” Instead of dancing at cotillions, to her bemusement and surprise, it became expected that Miss Huger would take the piano bench and play for the enjoyment of the younger crowd, who suddenly threw themselves into the round dances, the mazurka and the waltz that in her day were just the other side of proper, practiced only in the fastest set.
And there came a point—where was it?—when Addie learned to smile at the girl she’d been, who had believed that love like Evangeline’s exists outside the imaginations of poets and the pages of their books. She swallowed down her disappointment and reconciled herself to the fact that she would never marry, that she would have her morning walks in White Point Garden and spend her afternoons with books and visits to the sick, and take the family pew at St. Michael’s every Sunday and fold her spotted hands and listen, nodding, to the sermon and die an old maid like her aunt and be buried in the churchyard there, with Great Michael, the deep bell in the carillon, to mourn for her and count the hours into years. There were worse fates, after all. Far worse. And then, just when this future seemed assured, when Addie had accepted it, one night Harlan DeLay, who was rich but from a family that was not quite proper—not proper by a stretch—came to supper. He made her a compliment about her gown and laughed at a remark she made. Their eyes met over it, and something passed. Even now, Addie cannot say what. But she does not deceive herself that it was love, not even the sort she felt for Paul. Yet she liked Harlan’s jollity and size. In his slightly hazy ginger eyes there was a spark of play, something eager, childlike, reckless, that sought confirmation of its effect in her and did not appear to entertain the possibility of disappointment. And, too, there was the sympathy of one motherless child for another. She quickly saw the effects the lack of female governance had had in him, the way he laughed too loudly and sought to draw too much attention to himself, but these were things she felt that she could help to temper and correct. He seemed to want correction in that way, and even said so.
And so she took the gloves and sugarplums he sent her during Race Week in the mad runup to Sumter and felt eighteen again. But what moved Addie more than these was a simple gift of flowers. In a time when Charleston’s gallants relied upon the florists, who made up trite bouquets of pinks and bud roses wired stiffly to a stick, with geranium leaves and silver paper frills beneath, Harlan had the wit to pick a quart of white musk roses from Wando Passo’s hothouse. The morning after the Jockey Club Ball—where, in the carriage riding home, she first allowed a kiss—he sent them to her in a little wicker creel. Somehow those flowers, hinting at a sensitivity, an original turn of mind she hadn’t clearly seen before, set Addie irreversibly upon her course.
And so, when Harlan asked her for her hand, she said yes, and did so gratefully despite the tales she’d heard about his father. Percival DeLay’s alliance with Paloma—the Cuban Negress he brought back from Matanzas years ago—is i
nfamous throughout the Lowcountry. (Some say he won her in a game of cards!) Paloma’s children serve in privileged roles on the estate. Due to these peculiarities, no few wedding invitations were declined, a slight that not even the Huger name could prevent. Harlan tried to speak to her about the situation once, but he grew flustered, and Addie, having accepted him already, felt that it would be indelicate to press. “When I’m master, things will be different,” is all he really said. “I mean Wando Passo to be a proper home for us and for our children, Addie, the way it never was for me. With you as mistress, it can be a great house again.”
Actually, in the moment, he seemed rather fine, and his dream was one that she could share. The truth is, when he asked her, Addie fairly leapt. And it was not for land or money or any of the things that social Charleston understands and cares about. Part of it was the chance for children and a family, things Addie longed for as a child, growing up a ward in her aunt’s house. The deeper reason, though, the one that only comes to Addie now, as she first looks at, then looks away from, Blanche, is this: she married him because she felt or feared that Harlan’s offer would be the last she would receive, her final chance to join the dancers in the dance.
And now, still holding Blanche’s hand, Addie turns and smiles, though her eyes do not participate. For a moment, they take on the oddly mesmerized and mesmerizing quality they’ve had since she was four months old, as she lay nursing with her dah on the sun-drenched beach at Pawleys, when her young parents walked, hand in hand, into a sparkling, calm sea, and did not come back.
“Look, Addie!” Blanche points.
