Mrs. Middleton resumed, “But Lydia told me there is more to it than that. That it is much deeper than some poetic phase. Apparently Richard’s great concern was whether Allington had done all of this before or after his visit to Cap d’Antibes. It was shortly after Allington’s return that Richard bought himself one of those metal detectors with the headsets. He now walks all over town with that thing on his head. I don’t know what on earth he hopes to find. It’s all too much for poor Richard. I don’t know how Lydia is going to fulfill her duties as president of the Symphony—” She paused for a moment, as if she were studying something far away. “Do excuse me, I just want to have a word with Charlotte. I think they may be getting ready to put their house on the market, and I want to tell her I may have someone for it.”
They watched Mrs. Middleton push her way through the guests toward Charlotte. Eliza turned to Henry. “In your paper?”
“I plead innocent. If it were in it, then Louisa put it in just to get me to stop pining for you all these years. But I’m almost certain it was not.”
“Then why does everyone think I married a lord?”
“Because you know, Eliza, come on, everybody here has always loved you. You were the perfect girl—pretty, bright, charming, of course they all wanted you to marry some rich, titled aristocrat. It’s Charleston’s own version of kindness and support. It’s what they think you deserve. And sounds like you have come pretty close—a Barings? If I recall there are a number of titles in that family and a bank, I might add.”
“Nowhere close to Jamie, but he does work half of his time for his family’s merchant bank. The other half he makes documentary films in remote third world countries.” The mention of Jamie’s name reminded Eliza how far away his world was from all that surrounded her now. She wondered how long it would take before he got restless in a place like Charleston.
“So he is an explorer?”
“No, filmmaker, but his last film was about an eighty-year-old explorer who was born in England but grew up in Kenya . . .”
A tall woman with gray hair pulled back in a tight bun and wearing a cream silk shift with a large African necklace of silver, turquoise, and orange beads came toward Eliza with open arms. “Oh, Eliza dear, you’re back.” Anne de Liesseline embraced Eliza. “Oh dear, it is so good to have you back. I’m just leaving”—she glanced behind her—“trying to avoid Mary Elizabeth, who is in relentless pursuit of my recipe for kumquat wine, which I am not inclined to give her. I promised my aunt Zenobia on her deathbed I would keep that recipe in the family. Mary Elizabeth is so desperate to get this recipe that she cornered me at church last Sunday and started quoting passages about sharing from the Bible—something from II Corinthians about whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and whoever sows generously will reap generously. I told her that my family’s recipe couldn’t hold a candle to Cecelia Langdon’s. Cecelia has been serving it to all the tourists she tortures around this city. I thought I had managed to put Mary Elizabeth off, but apparently not. Must dash, but promise me you and Henry will come over Tuesday for a drink. Louisa Eveleigh—Henry’s star columnist”—she winked and lifted her chin toward Henry—“is bringing her new beau. We have no idea what to expect, Henry, do we? The last one was some poor soul from one of the finest families of Camden—a manic-depressive who has tried to commit suicide three times. On his last attempt, he jumped off an overpass onto the interstate. Missed the eighteen-wheeler he was aiming for. Broke both legs but is surprisingly well. He might have tried something higher than an overpass. Really. I told Louisa that I felt dreadfully sorry for the poor fellow but, well, you know, he’s surely not the one to pin her hopes on.”
A waiter presented a tray of miniature crab cakes.
“Oh my, I think I will.” Anne picked up a napkin and popped a crab cake into her mouth. “Thank goodness, she’s your cousin, not mine. I think I’m related to almost everybody in this city either by blood or marriage or both—Lord, it’s why so many of us are so crazy, but I think somehow I’ve managed to sidestep that side of the Eveleigh family. Eliza, your father and I—how I miss him, how we used to laugh—he could tell me how everyone was related to everyone else so that by the time he had finished with them, they looked like a voodoo doll with ancestral lines stuck in them. He had such a mind—he would never get lost. Oh dear. How he could make me laugh.” Anne dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “Must run. Lots of love, do promise you’ll come Tuesday evening.”
Young women in strapless pastel dresses and young men in black tie began arriving. The band, which had been playing soft swing music, packed up their instruments and moved off the wooden platform at the back of the property. The second band, a geriatric but sprightly group of six black men dressed alike in tuxedos with hot pink lapels, began to set up. Three stood in a line to sing, while the other three adjusted and checked their instruments—keyboard, guitar, and drums.
“Let’s watch this,” Henry said. He rested his foot on the seat of a folding chair and leaned his forearm on his knee. “I bet they’re going to be good.” Henry shifted his head to the side to read the name in fuchsia glitter across the front of the drums. “Harold and the Exciters.”
The singers stood at attention for a few minutes, almost as if in silent prayer, then the middle singer jerked his head up and counted loudly, “One, two, three,” and they began “I Can’t Help Myself.”
“Not bad, not bad at all,” Henry mused. He cracked ice in his teeth as he watched. By the time Harold and the Exciters had finished their first song, the dance floor was filled with young couples, by the time they had finished their second, most of the older crowd had begun to leave. “Come on, let’s see if you still remember how to dance.” And then more to himself than to Eliza, he said softly, “Let’s see if I still remember how to dance.”
Henry was an accomplished dancer. Every child who grew up in downtown Charleston was enrolled in fours years of Junior Cotillion at the South Carolina Society Hall on Meeting Street. No one left without knowing how to waltz and dance the foxtrot and the lindy. But even among the Charleston crowd, Henry stood out. He made Eliza laugh as he spun her away and pulled her back and passed her hand behind his back or over his head. He danced with an ease and nonchalance that made young men wish they could imitate him and young women wish they could dance with him.
CHAPTER FOUR
DURING THE BREAKS BETWEEN SETS, HENRY AND ELIZA drifted around the party, and Henry amused Eliza with stories about Charleston. As the night wore on, bow ties were loosened, makeup and perfume faded, and jackets abandoned to the summer heat. The caterers began to perform their end-of-evening decampment. Glasses and bottles were slotted away, tablecloths folded, and card tables collapsed into panes of metal. The band announced their last set. A few couples protested and clustered round them with final requests.
“Tired?” Henry asked. “Come on, let’s go upstairs. We can go the back way.” He took Eliza’s hand and led her off the dance floor toward the house. A waiter passed by, hurrying toward the decampment with a tray of untouched drinks, and Henry leaned over and took one. Eliza followed Henry to the kitchen house, up a narrow flight of stairs, and through a back passageway that opened onto a large unlit library. He led her across the library to the door leading to the piazza. It was locked. “Here,” he said and raised the sash of the wide window and steadied her as she scissor-kicked across the waist-high sill.
“Hold this.” He handed her his drink as he followed, stepping over the sill. “I’d forgotten how much of this house I still remember. When my great-aunt used to own it, we’d come over for Sunday lunches. I spent most of the time playing hide-and-seek with my older cousins.” Henry walked out onto the piazza toward the front of the house and stood with his back to Eliza and hooked his hands in his pockets. “I’ve always loved the view of the harbor from here.” Henry flipped a switch to turn the lights off. “Now you can really see the water.”
“Are you sure you should do that?” Eliza a
sked.
“No one down there will notice.” Henry walked to the front of the piazza overlooking the harbor. “And now no one will be able to tell who is up here. We’ll just be dark shadows on an unlit porch.” A three-quarters moon spread a wide silver path from the battery wall to the horizon. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Henry said. “It’s like being on a ship. I’ve always felt as if I were somewhere else when I’m up here. It’s too majestic, somehow, for Charleston.”
Eliza sat on the wicker sofa. She took her shoes off and tucked her feet under her. Henry walked back and sat sidesaddle on the balustrading.
“You aren’t wearing any socks,” she observed.
“Couldn’t find any—why I was late.” Henry cracked the last cubes of ice in his teeth. “So tell me about Jamie.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How did you meet?”
“We met one summer in East Hampton. His sister, Fleur, was in the graduate program with me at Columbia.”
“After Princeton, you went there after Princeton.” Henry confirmed what he already knew.
“Yes, I got a master’s in English and then decided that the world did not need another essay on Jane Austen, or at least not from me, so I switched to art history and got a second master’s. In between, I worked for a year at a gallery downtown. Anyway, Fleur invited me out for a weekend. Jamie had been working on a documentary in Chile, and he had come for a visit.”
Eliza didn’t tell Henry how Jamie had shown up when dinner was almost over because his plane from South America had landed late at JFK. He looked as if he had not slept for several days. He didn’t say a word to anyone except to ask for an espresso. Nor did she tell Henry how, as she was leaving the next morning, Jamie had knocked on the window of her car. She rolled her window down, and he asked, “Are you Eliza?” She nodded, and he ran his hand over his unshaven jaw and walked back inside. He called her the next afternoon and asked her to dinner.
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“How did the two of you get together if you were in New York and he lived in London.”
“I started seeing him when I moved to London.”
“Is it serious?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Henry slid off the railing. “What do you mean suppose?”
“God, Henry.” Eliza held up her hand as if to shield herself. “I don’t know, I guess I mean we’ve had our ups and downs.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like such an inquisitor. But you are still seeing him?”
“I am.”
“But you don’t want to talk about . . .”
“No, not really.”
Henry nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Eliza listened to the intertwined currents of voices and music down below. Jamie had left London and headed to Scotland a few days before her flight to Charleston. If the weather held, he would be on a boat with a small film crew heading to St. Kilda. She doubted, as Jamie hoped, that distance or time would change anything between them.
“How about you?” Eliza asked.
“Me?” Henry leaned against a column. “What about me?”
“So what have you been doing since . . .”
“How much do you know about what happened?”
“Some, I don’t know, not that much really. I heard things, but I never asked, I just . . .”
“Where do you want me to start? What if I tell you everything in reverse?”
“Start now and go backward?”
“I can start at the beginning or the middle or anywhere if you promise to stay until I finish.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know where to tell you to start. My mother wrote me about your father. I’m sorry I never wrote you.”
“Eliza, after what I did to you, I didn’t expect to hear from you.” Henry held the railing on each side of his body, as if to steady himself.
“What happened?”
“He had a massive heart attack. He went to work one morning, and we never saw him again.” Henry looked down at the crowd and watched the band, which had been cajoled into one more set. “Dr. Walker said he was lucky to have lived as long as he did.” He tapped the thin cocktail straw on top of the wooden balustrade and then moved his fingers back and forth across it. “After the funeral, I had to go to his office and sort out his affairs, and you know, I didn’t even know where his office was. And I remember walking down the corridor, not certain I was in the right place but not wanting anyone to realize that I didn’t know, and when I got to his office, I only knew it was his when I spotted a photograph taken after we had won a men’s doubles tournament when I was fifteen. And I was undone by how arrogant and dismissive of everything I had been. And how hurtful it must have been to my father. It was a hell of a time to realize all that. I had to take over everything, so that’s what I’ve been doing since then. Running the paper. I never expected to.”
“I never imagined you working at the newspaper.”
“I know, neither did I. When I was going through everything, I came across some copies of the newspaper from the 1920s and 1930s. It was a serious newspaper back then. You know it even won a Pulitzer in the 1920s. I’d had no idea. I’ve been gradually trying to turn it into more of a serious paper. More international news, and as more people move down here or have second homes, I think the desire for a better paper is there.”
“And you do have that society page.”
“We really mustn’t forget that—it accounts for at least half of our increase in circulation,” Henry laughed. “We’ve bought a few small southern newspapers. One in Mississippi, two in Georgia. Actually I’m going to look at one in New Orleans at the end of the week. The entire industry is going through a lot of consolidation.” Henry came over and sat down next to Eliza on the sofa. “I feel as if you are floating away.”
Eliza shifted her body sideways, closer to Henry. “I’m not. I’m right here. And your son?”
“Lawton.”
“Is ten?”
“Lawton is nine.”
“Does he look like you?”
“He does.”
“And I bet you’ve already taught him to play tennis.”
“I have. Actually he’s not bad for his age.”
The mention of Lawton made Eliza realize how many years had passed since they had last seen each other. The time she and Henry had been together could be folded three times into the time they had been apart. “Is your mother still on Legare Street?” she asked.
“She is.”
“Where are you living?”
“We stay in the carriage house. I made the loft into two small bedrooms. When Lawton was born, I lived down at Oakhurst with my parents. I was working in Columbia for Judge Todd, but I came home to Oakhurst every weekend. Bessie—you remember Harold and Bessie—looked after him. When Lawton was three we moved back into town, into the carriage house behind my parents, so that he could be with other children. When I travel or have a business dinner that goes late, Lawton stays in my old room right across the hall from my mother. But most of the time it’s just the two of us in the carriage house.”
“Where does he go to school?”
“Charleston Day. Most mornings I walk him to school, and my mother collects him. In a few years he’ll be able to ride his bike there and back.”
Henry stood up again, walked to the edge of the piazza, braced his arms straight against the balustrade, and looked out over the crowd. He looked back at Eliza. “It’s not so bad, this place, really. I never expected to be back here—or at least not so soon. I always thought that we would—well—that after law school I would go to New York and you would be there, too.” Henry paused and sighed. “Anyway, you know, Eliza, as long as you’ve had the chance to get out of here and see it from the outside, then it’s fine. Then you know what you’re dealing with. Then you know you can take it or leave it.” Henry stopped talking and listened to the band playing “You Send Me.”
> Eliza looked at the clusters of remaining guests as if she were trying to discern some pattern. “So why haven’t you gotten married?”
“Again?” He closed his eyes for a moment and tucked his chin close to his chest.
“Yes, I guess again.”
Henry looked at his watch. “It’s almost one.”
“You’re avoiding me.”
“I am, I absolutely am, but it’s late. Much too late now to talk about anything serious.” He looked down at the knots of people who remained on the lawn. “Come on. I’ll take you home.” He took her hand and helped her across the window transom and down the dark hallway to the back staircase.
“I can’t see anything.”
“Here, let me go first.” Henry stepped in front of her. “Put one hand here.” He placed her hand on the stair rail. “Now put your other hand on my shoulder.” When she did as he instructed, her feeling of safety somersaulted away from her.
“Henry, I still can’t see anything. I can’t even see you.”
“Don’t worry, I know this place blind. Eleven steps down to the landing, then left, another twelve to the bottom.” He counted slowly, “Here, eight, nine, ten, eleven, landing—end of the landing is just here—careful.”
When they emerged from the house, the band was packing up. Henry held Eliza back in the shadows to let a cluster of three guests pass. “Wasn’t that the Alstons and Sallie Izard?” Eliza asked.
Henry nodded. “I’m surprised they’re still here.”
“Shouldn’t we have spoken to them?”
“Probably.” He held her back for another group to pass. He took her hand and led her to Sara.
“We’re trying to convince them to play one more set,” Sara said in an overly optimistic voice.
“We’re off, your party was lovely.” Eliza kissed Sara good night.
“We’re all going to Big John’s afterward, you and Henry should come.”
“Don’t think I will make it, I’m five hours ahead of you,” Eliza said.
“Well, if you change your mind . . .”
Charleston Page 4
