“This is Grand,” Lulu said from the arm of the old woman’s chair. “I told you she was a witch. Grand, this is my friend Emily Parmenter.”
“Yes,” the old lady said, still holding Emily’s hands. “She certainly is a Parmenter. Or a Carter, I should say. Child, you are the very image of your mother when she was a young girl, although I imagine you are tired of hearing that. When I first met her, she had her hair up just like that. A Renoir, just as you are.”
“Did you know my mother?” Emily breathed out of flaccid lungs. There was nothing about this night that was not alien to her. Down deep, very faintly, Buddy said, “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”
She smiled involuntarily, and the old lady smiled back.
“Sit down beside me and after a while I’ll tell you how I knew her,” she said. “Lulu, bring the tea tray. I had Rusky bring out a little of everything they’re having at the house. It’s enough to stun an elephant.”
Lulu brought a heavy old silver tray and set it on a small table next to her grandmother’s chair. She poured out three cups of tea into thin white porcelain cups and handed them to Emily and her grandmother, and made up three plates of food and handed them around, also. She handled the tea things as if she had been born doing it. Well, Emily thought, she had.
She looked at her plate. There were enormous pink pickled shrimp; tiny biscuits with rosy ham in them; a minute, glossy brown bird she identified as a dove, sauced in something thick and purple; candied, sugared fruit; cheese straws; benné biscuits; a slice of just-pink roast beef; slender stalks of white asparagus dripping velvety gold sauce. On another tray waited elaborately carved pastries filled with swirls of creamy yellow and deep red and ivory, slices of seed cake, and something she had never seen before, tiny puffs filled with whipped cream and covered with chocolate.
“Profiteroles,” Lulu said. “Rusky makes them better than anybody in three counties. Every bakery in Charleston has tried to hire her. Lemon and sugar, Emily?”
“Yes,” Emily mumbled. “Please.”
She looked around her for somewhere to put the cup and plate down; the spindly mahogany chair the old lady had indicated for her had no arms, and there were no small tables near.
“Lulu, the lap trays,” the old lady said. “Have you forgotten all your manners in a measly three months?”
Lulu brought beautiful, thin, gold-and-ivory inlaid trays of some very dark wood and slipped one onto Emily’s lap.
“This ought to do it,” she said.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, old Mrs. Foxworth with gusto, Lulu nibbling at this and that, Emily watching Lulu and only taking bites of what Lulu did. She finished some of the beef tenderloin and several benné biscuits and cheese straws, but the rest was unfamiliar to her, and she was absurdly frightened that she would spit it out on her plate.
“What in God’s name is this on the doves?” Lulu said querulously. “It tastes like cough syrup.”
“It’s port and prune sauce,” her grandmother said gleefully. “Your mother and I made a deal: she gets to try out new things on each of my birthdays without my permission, and in exchange she doesn’t just pop in with this person or that who ‘just couldn’t bear to leave without saying hello.’ I’d never even met the last batch of pop-ins.”
“Well, she should have stuck to the champagne sauce. This is terrifying,” Lulu said, pushing her plate away.
“Actually, I’d have liked it better if she’d stuck to a quail stew and venison chili, like I had for the first few birthday parties, before they turned into obligatory audiences with the Queen Mother.”
“You haven’t given anybody an audience in years, unless you specifically asked them, and you know it,” Lulu said comfortably, stretching her long legs in toward the fire.
“Well, the parties aren’t about me anymore. They’re about Maybelle’s obsessive need for her friends to come and listen to a crazy old lady shoot off a shotgun at midnight. I understand it’s considered a great coup to be invited to stand on the terrace and listen for the shots and drink champagne. Lots of people say they were actually here with me when I did it, I’m told. I’m a Lowcountry legend. Maybelle wouldn’t give up one of those for a membership in the Colonial Dames. Only the very oldest and best Lowcountry families have living legends. People write me up in tour guide books, I think. It’s been almost ten years since I actually came to the party at the big house.”
Emily grinned. She couldn’t help it. This was power; not the trappings of plantations and Christmas hunts and debutante balls and the Saint Cecilia Society. This was the power to refuse the lot of it and live as you pleased. She thought old Mrs. Foxworth had been born with that power. She thought Lulu might be reaching for it now, with her refusal to come home to Maybud for her season. She’d make it, too; Emily would bet on that. She’d bet that Lulu would ultimately do anything she wanted, and pay no price at all.
After they had finished, Mrs. Foxworth looked keenly at Emily and then Lulu.
“Stand up and let me look at you both,” she said, and they stood obediently before her. Maybe, Emily thought, she’s going to give us the signal for the long down.
“Lulu, you look well,” the old lady said. “Far better than you did when you got home in June. You’ve got color, and those awful shoulder blades have filled in some. Are you eating well? People who cook for themselves often don’t.”
“I am eating well,” Lulu smiled. “I have dinner most nights now with the Parmenters, and Emily’s Aunt Jenny is a fabulous cook, and I’m sleeping well and loving every minute with the dogs. Emily’s teaching me; she’s so good that all she has to do is think a command to a dog and he does it. It’s uncanny. So don’t fuss, Grand.”
Sleeping well? Emily thought. All those nights when her lights burned till dawn, all those nights when she needed Elvis?
“Well, I won’t fuss then. According to your mother you’re being held captive on a dog farm hundreds of miles away from home and can’t manage to escape. I’m glad to know the truth.”
“You knew it anyway,” Lulu said. “I told Mother and Daddy I wasn’t coming home until I was good and ready, and…I’m not. I’d stay at Sweetwater forever if they’d have me. Anyway, I talk to Mother every day, practically. I just tell her I’m going to hang up if she starts in on coming home for the season. After a couple of times, she quit bugging me.”
“So are you coming home? At all?” The old woman looked intently at Lulu.
“Oh, probably. Sometime. But not for the goddamned season. I really do know what’s best for me now, Grand.”
“So you do,” her grandmother said. “At any rate, you both look terribly glamorous tonight. It’s a shame to waste those dresses on an old lady with a shotgun. Lulu, don’t I recognize that one you’re wearing?”
The dress was a long, slim column of white silk satin that fell to the floor in folds around Lulu’s shoes. It had a pleated bodice and only one thin shoulder strap, and in it, with the golden tan and her gilt hair falling straight and shiny and only small diamond earrings, Emily thought that she should be living on Olympus instead of a dog farm.
“Yep,” Lulu said. “Steuben’s on King Street made it for me for my eighteenth birthday party. You’re the first person besides the Parmenters who’s seen me in it.”
“That’s right, you didn’t go to that party,” Mrs. Foxworth smiled. “I heard you went out to Booter’s bait shack off Folly Creek and drank beer and ate oysters and shagged with the locals till dawn. You must have been a sensation.”
“Oh, I was,” Lulu said.
“Now, Emily,” the old woman said, turning her blue pagan eyes on her. “Let’s see. Hair, perfect. Pearls just right for a young girl. And the white piqué is just lovely on you; it’s plain and modest, and yet it shows what you’ll be when you grow up. You’re a very pretty girl, you know. As your mother was. You could walk into any ball anywhere in the Lowcountry and cause a commotion. As your mother did.
”
“My mother…” Emily began.
“Later,” Mrs. Foxworth smiled. “I promise. Now, Lulu, don’t I know Emily’s dress, too?”
“My graduation dress from Charlotte Hall,” Lulu said. “It fits Emily far better than it ever did me. It might have been made for her, that tiny waist and those nice boobs. I’m trying to give it to her.”
Emily felt scarlet heat climb her neck to her face.
“Well, they are nice,” the old woman said. “You’ll be quite glad of them one day, my dear. I had to stuff stockings in my bras all my life. But how on earth did you get hold of the dresses, Lulu? Did you stage a commando raid on the house in the dark of the moon?”
“I called the kitchen line and got Moselle, and she went and found them and the jewelry and Leland smuggled them out to me. The shoes we got at Target.”
She held out one narrow brown foot, nearly naked in strappy silver. The very high heels were caked with mud. Emily put one foot behind the other and tried to hide her ruined white satin kitten-heeled sandals. They would not bear close scrutiny.
“Don’t be embarrassed, my dear,” Mrs. Foxworth smiled. “Lulu and I get all our shoes at Target. I don’t mind paying a king’s ransom for a really good dress, but shoes are just—shoes. They wear out. They get scuffed and muddy. Feet are ugly anyway. I never saw the sense in those Manolo Blahnik things. These are Target’s finest. Cost me twenty-four dollars.”
She held out a twisted old foot so Emily could see the gleaming black satin pump.
Some debutantes are cheap. Yet another truth snapped into the grid inside Emily.
“All right, you’ve earned the story about how I met your mother,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “Get comfortable on that couch. Lulu, see if you can find my cigarettes. I think I left them on my dressing table.”
“Those things are going to kill you one day, Grand,” Lulu said, getting up and leaving the room.
The absurdity of that struck Emily at the same time it did the old lady. They smiled at each other. Suddenly Emily very much liked this cigarette-smoking, Target-wearing, shotgun-toting, diamond-encrusted, chili-eating old woman. To her surprise, she felt comfortable in the deep old sofa in front of the fire. The fire lulled, and the rich eccentricity of the big room warmed, and the surety of safety from party-going eyes soothed. She tucked her feet up under her with a small sigh of relief.
“I don’t know if Lulu’s told you, but at one time I taught at Charlotte Hall. English. I was just married and the house was about as furnished as it was going to get, so I needed something to do and they were kind enough to take me on. But then the children came along and there was no thought of going back to work. Not in Charleston, even if you could have afforded nannies and such. Not even I thought of it, not then. But I did have all the help in the world, and I just couldn’t make myself do the bridge club-garden club-Junior League business. So I thought I might do some tutoring at home, and Charlotte Hall referred some of its students to me. Pretty soon mothers from all over the place were bringing their children to me, children of all ages, and it got so I could only take just so many. I was really full up when your mother called and asked if I could take her son. Buddy, she said his name was. I don’t think I ever knew his full name.”
She stopped and looked at Emily. Emily merely stared. Buddy here. Her mother, here. She could not make it compute, so she said nothing, merely looked.
“He was ten when she brought him to me,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “He had been in public school on Edisto, I think, but his disease was beginning to make him clumsy, and the children were pretty cruel to him. Caroline brought him in, holding his hand, and he stopped and looked around the room and said, ‘If Merlyn had gotten to pick his cave, this would be it.’
“I loved him instantly. And I think he saw a friend in me. From the beginning, he was the quickest child I have ever taught, and his hour-long sessions turned into two and sometimes three. When we were not reading we were talking—about everything. Everything under the sun interested him. And this room just enchanted him. We spent a lot of time just looking at the things in here, and I’d tell him stories about how this or that got here.”
She paused again, and took a deep drag off her crimson-smeared cigarette. Emily looked around the room. She could see why Buddy loved it. Every wall had shelves bursting untidily with books. Window seats and tables were piled with them. Here and there paintings were propped against the shelves, rich, savage things, along with luminous landscapes of the Lowcountry. Photographs crowded tables and desks. Her eye stopped on one. It was silver-framed, a photograph of a youngish, very blond woman standing at the foot of a bridge. Crowds milled in the background. A black man stood beside the woman with his arm around her shoulder. They were talking earnestly. The black man was unmistakably Martin Luther King Jr. The young woman might have been Lulu, but it was old Mrs. Foxworth in her youth. Emily looked at her, and then over at Lulu, who was lounging in a deep chair with her legs stretched out, smiling.
“Your eyes do not deceive you,” Lulu said. “That is indeed Dr. King with Grand. And that’s the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Grand marched with Dr. King that day. In fact, she marched a good bit, around the South. If she hadn’t been a Coltrane who married a Foxworth, she would have been shunned like the Amish do to their rebels. As it was, everybody just shook their heads and said, ‘The Coltranes never did keep their girls on a tight enough leash,’ and ‘The Foxworths got just what they deserve, sending all their boys to Princeton and Yale.’ Granddaddy’s back there in the crowd, waiting for the march to start. He had a scar on his arm all his life from a police dog.”
Old Mrs. Foxworth smiled.
“Yep,” she said. “Brad and I were Charleston’s original hippies. Only hippies, in fact, so far as I know. Your brother loved that photograph. He made me tell him the story over and over. The first time he saw it, he said, ‘I would have marched, too.’ And he would have. Even if he had had to do it in a wheelchair. Your brother was one of the bravest people I have ever met, Emily.”
“You should have seen his room at home,” Emily said through a tight throat. “It looked just like this. Did you get to know my mother?”
Mrs. Foxworth shook her head. “Not really. Just to exchange pleasantries with when she brought Buddy. She was a beautiful thing; looking at you is like looking at a photograph of her. So intense and effervescent. She was always in a hurry to be somewhere. I always imagined the places she was going were glamorous in the extreme. She would kiss Buddy on the forehead and say, ‘Don’t get too smart, sweetie,’ and be gone out the door like a hummingbird. Buddy would dive into a pile of books and hardly look up until she came back for him. He absorbed more in three years than an ordinary boy could in twelve. We got drunk on books, Buddy and I did.”
“Did you like her? My mother?” Emily asked. It was an important question.
The old lady considered. Then she shook her head. “No.”
There was another silence. The fire snickered behind its screen.
“Three years…” Emily whispered
“Well, he didn’t come back much after your mother…was gone. Once in a while your aunt would bring him, if she had some time off from school, and once your father did. I could see a lot of your father in Buddy. I missed him terribly, but we talked on the phone several times a week, up until…he was maybe seventeen.”
“Did he ever talk about me?” Emily said in a small voice. It seemed a very self-centered thing to say, but she was desperate to know this other undreamed-of part of Buddy’s life.
“Indeed he did,” the old woman said. “You were just three when he first came here, and he was very excited about you. ‘I’m going to have somebody to read with me,’ he said. ‘When she gets a little older we’re going to read everything in the world.’ And I believe you did, didn’t you? When we talked he’d always tell me about what you were reading, and what you thought about it. He said that you were very smart. Very…intuitive, I think he said.”<
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“I’m not smart,” Emily said, looking into the fire. “I don’t know how to do anything but train dogs.”
“But you read, don’t you?” Mrs. Foxworth said.
“No,” Emily said briefly. She was not going to go into this, not even with this fabulous old witch. Not even with Lulu.
“That’s a shame,” Mrs. Foxworth said, but she did not say it reprovingly.
Out over the river the sky suddenly burst into bloom, in arcs of silver and blue and red and green.
“Oh, God, it’s the damned fireworks,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “I must be a year older. I really let it slip by this time. Lulu, fetch me the gun, please.”
Lulu got up and went out of the room and came back carrying a shotgun. Emily felt her stomach heave and bile rise up toward her throat. She could not speak and she did not move. The gun was old and polished, silver-clad, carved, very beautiful. When Mrs. Foxworth took it from Lulu, Emily flinched, and made an involuntary sound of pain and revulsion.
Holding the gun broken over her thin arm, Mrs. Foxworth turned and studied Emily.
“It was a Purdey, wasn’t it?” she said gently.
Emily nodded, her eyes squeezed shut, both against tears and the sight of the shotgun.
“Oh, child. I’m so sorry. Come and sit by me and let me tell you about Purdeys. They are beautiful pieces of art and work, and I would hate for you to carry all that fear and horror around with you all your life. You’ll surely see other Purdeys if you train gun dogs. You can’t run from every one of them.”
She patted the arm of her chair. Emily did not move.
“I can’t,” she whispered, tears starting. “You can’t make me. I want to go home. Lulu, I want to go home now.”
“Grand, do you really think…?” Lulu began, and then stopped. She looked from Emily to her grandmother and back again. It was clear that she did not understand the exchange, but clear also that she knew it was causing Emily pain.
“I really do,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “I really do. But it must be Emily’s decision, of course.”
Sweetwater Creek Page 19
