At two o’clock, Eliza returned to the library. By four, she had finished looking through the nine boxes marked HENRIETTA JOHNSTON. She returned the boxes to Mrs. Hutson and asked for the next nine. Mrs. Hutson said they could be brought up the following day, so Eliza spent the rest of the afternoon researching the names and dates of eighteenth-century newspapers that had been published in Charleston and then reading through any that had been preserved on microfiche. She was looking for any articles about Henrietta Johnston’s husband becoming the minister of St. Philip’s or any advertisements for portrait painting.
By five o’clock, her eyes ached. She rubbed the back of her neck and returned the roles of microfiche to Mrs. Hutson. She rode her bicycle down King and turned on Broad. She got off her bicycle before she passed St. Michael’s and walked the rest of the way home down Meeting Street. In the garden of the house next to the First Scots Presbyterian Church, she watched a small boy and girl squatting down with a magnifying glass. They were trying to burn a hole in a leaf by tilting the magnifying glass toward the late afternoon sun.
When she arrived home there was a letter from Jamie. She had not told Jamie about Henry. She picked up his letter and took it with her and sat in the garden, listening to the sounds of the late afternoon sprinklers. It was postmarked from Scotland the day before she had left for Charleston.
My dearest Eliza,
I know we agreed to have a break and not contact each other for these two weeks, but I felt badly that I left so abruptly. We head off tomorrow and, if the weather holds, may stay an extra week. No one on the crew has a pressing commitment, so we are going to try to get everything we need on this trip.
Aunt Annabel sends her love. She has put me in the same guest cottage with the bedroom and fireplace you loved so much. I remember the last time we were here together. We went on a walk, and you rescued the blind kitten, and you gave it medicine, and when I marvelled at how easily you could handle it, you told me sometimes things are so familiar they come back to you. I long for the familiar feeling of having you in my arms when I go to sleep.
We have another invitation to spend a week with Ian and Diana in St. Tropez this August. It made me think of our marathon drive last summer—you so sweetly stayed up all night to talk to me and play music so I wouldn’t fall asleep, and you made me laugh when you could tell I was getting tired. I told Ian I would check with you when you got back.
I know things between us haven’t been great, and I’ve put too much pressure on you, but I love you, and I miss you, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get us back.
I will try to call you to let you know if we are going to stay an extra week.
All my love, Jamie
Had she moved so far away from where she and Jamie were when she left that she no longer recognized where they had been? Jamie was sweet and kind, and she loved that about him. She remembered the little skinny black kitten they had found crouched in the tall grass in one of the fields not far from his aunt’s house. She remembered how she had cradled its small head in her left hand and opened its eyes for the drops she squeezed with her right. And when she handed the small bundle to the caretaker’s wife, who was happy to have the kitten as a mouser for the grain room in the barn, she also remembered feeling as if she were handing over a part of herself. Now she felt as if she were getting a part of her life back. But she had to return to London. She could not delay any later than the end of the month. She called Jamie’s flat in London and left a message that she would be returning at the end of June.
Eliza heard the kitchen door slam shut. Cornelia was leaving. Eliza called to her.
“Good Lord, you gave me a fright. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve seen somebody sitting in this garden. What’s got you so sad?”
“I’m not. It’s nothing.” Eliza wiped her face. “If you’re headed home, I’ll give you a ride.”
They sped out of Charleston taking the same route she and Henry had traveled less than a week before. Maybe it had taken her this long to return because she had feared the memory of a relationship in which there had been a history of almost any and everything—a laugh, a hand on her lower back, the way Henry sometimes looked at her. With Jamie, there had never been any danger of echoes.
Eliza dropped Cornelia off at her house, and Cornelia asked her to wait. She returned with a plastic bag of ripe tomatoes.
“Oh, Cornelia, thank you, but this is too many. I’ll take just a few.”
“Well, what about Henry?”
“He’s away, he’s coming back late Saturday night.”
HENRY CALLED EARLY SUNDAY MORNING. “ARE YOU STILL ON for this tennis match?”
“I can’t,” Eliza said. “Helen Halsey at the Gibbes said she could meet with me this morning to show me their file on Henrietta Johnston. She has a record of all the documented Johnstons. She’s leaving this afternoon for the next two weeks, and this was the only time she could meet me.”
“Okay, then how about meeting us for lunch at one.”
Five hours later, Eliza pulled up to what looked like an old railway car that had been set back on an asphalt parking lot behind the County Library on Calhoun Street.
“Bill’s Grill,” Eliza said, reading the large red letters that ran the length of the chrome and black railway car. “I don’t remember this being here,” she said to Henry, who had pulled into the parking lot ahead of her.
“It wasn’t,” Henry said
“Lawton, I bet this is your favorite restaurant,” Eliza said.
“They have great cherry Cokes,” Lawton said, as he passed through the door Henry held open. Lawton carried a stack of books in his arms. A few college students huddled in booths with the remains of breakfast on the table. Lawton wanted to sit at the counter on the red vinyl-covered stools.
“So how’d the match go?” Eliza asked.
“Painful. We lost.”
“Oh no, who did you play?”
“Dan and Jay Downing.” Henry explained, “I think I mentioned them to you—Betsy Downing was the one who reported Mr. DuBose. They bought the Simmons house on Tradd Street. Dan runs some sort of hedge fund. I think he mainly invests in distressed debt.”
“They must be good,” Eliza said.
“They cheated,” Lawton said as he twisted back and forth on his stool.
“Yeah, they did,” Henry said. “It was pretty pathetic. On match point, Lawton hit a winner three inches in, and Jay called it out, and Dan let the call stand. All during the match Dan was rifling Lawton with balls. Hey, Lawton.” Henry leaned over and touched the bill of Lawton’s tennis cap. “Hats off inside.”
“They sound pretty horrible,” Eliza said.
“They are. I doubt Dan was ever any good at sports when he was a kid, and now he takes these tournaments way too seriously. I think when they moved down to Charleston, they made a real play to join everything and got rebuffed pretty quickly. Dan got blackballed at the Yacht Club, and his wife didn’t make it into the Garden Club. I’m not sure the Downings would’ve ever made it into any of the clubs, no matter how long they waited, but Charleston has a way of making monsters out of some of the people who move down here.”
Lawton spun 360 degrees on his stool.
“Lawton, take it down three notches.”
“We could have won if you had hit the ball harder at Jay. You always tell me to ‘jump for the sun.’”
“Yeah, but if I had hit hard at Jay, then I would be just like Dan, wouldn’t I?” Henry winked at his son.
“I guess.”
“How y’all doing?” the waitress asked as she began wiping the counter in front of them. She laid down paper place mats and cutlery bundled in white paper napkins.
Eliza reached over and picked up Lawton’s pile of books. “Have you read all of these?”
Lawton nodded.
“So which one did you like the best?” Eliza shuffled through the pile and looked at Lawton, who didn’t answer. “The Book of Dogs. Are you thinking about getting
a dog?”
Henry leaned back. “Possibly next summer for Lawton’s tenth birthday.”
“That’s exciting.” She picked up the book and opened it. “What is the name of the dog that looks like a mop. A professor at Princeton who taught the introductory course on music had two, and they would always come to his lectures. It’s not a shar-pei, oh, what is it, it’s an unusual name . . .”
“Komondor,” Lawton said.
“Komondor? Are they in this book?” Eliza started to flip through, and Lawton reached over and took the book and found the page and handed it back.
“Look, here it is. Hungarian livestock guardian dog. That’s interesting—I didn’t know that. So what other interesting books do you have? Let’s see—pirates or ghosts.” She picked Blackbeard: Eighteenth-Century Pirate of the Carolina Coast. “His real name was Edward . . . ?”
“Teach,” Lawton said.
“That’s right, and he was called the gentleman pirate, wasn’t he?”
“No, that was Stede Bonnet.”
“Then which one was hung on the Battery?”
“Stede Bonnet. Blackbeard was shot in Virginia.”
“I’d say you definitely know your pirates.” Eliza exchanged the book for the one on ghost stories. “Is the story of the gray man in here?”
“You mean the ghost who always appears to warn people before a hurricane?”
“Yes, exactly, that’s the one.”
Lawton leaned toward Eliza. “It’s in the back.”
Eliza turned to the back pages. “‘The Gray Man of Pawley’s Island.’ So you must be pretty brave, if these stories don’t scare you.”
Lawton started to spin his stool again, and Henry looked at him. Lawton grabbed the counter with both hands to stop himself.
A waitress slapped down three menus before moving to the next table.
“And the last book?” Eliza asked as she handed Lawton back his book of ghost stories.
“Is about World War II airplanes.”
“Lawton likes to draw them,” Henry said.
Eliza was going to say that she used to draw animals—horses and dogs mainly—when she was Lawton’s age, but she was tired of trying. Lawton was hard work. She picked up the menu.
“Hey, Lawton, when we drop these books off, we should remember to choose a book for your summer project,” Henry said.
The waitress circled back, and she looked at Lawton and asked, “The usual?”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
She looked at Eliza. “I’ll have an egg white omelet with—”
The waitress cut her off. “We don’t do those.”
“You just separate the egg yolk and cook the egg whites.”
The waitress looked at Eliza as if she were speaking a foreign tongue. Henry leaned over. “Eliza, you are in the South.” He turned to the waitress and said, “She’ll have a plain omelet very dry with toast instead of hash browns, and I’ll have a tuna sandwich on wheat. She’ll have iced tea, I’ll have water.” He smiled at the waitress and handed the menus back to her.
“I’m guessing it would have been a waste of breath to ask for unsweetened ice tea?”
“Time to enjoy being southern again,” Henry said, amused. “By the way,” he said as he snapped his fingers, “before I forget, I ran into Anne this morning, and she wants to take you to see her portrait of Sallie—”
“Want to play ‘Overnight to Many Distant Cities’?” Lawton interrupted and began to twist side to side on his stool again.
“I don’t know how to,” Eliza said.
“It’s okay. I’ll just play with my dad,” Lawton said.
“It’s more fun with three, Lawton, tell Eliza the rules.”
“You first think of a city, and then you say one thing you are going to pack in your suitcase, and then the next person has to repeat what you said and then add something else. If you forget what someone says, then you have to drop out. And you keep going around until only one person is left.”
“I see,” said Eliza. She looked at Lawton. “I can choose any city I want?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Let’s see.” Eliza looked at the ceiling. “Okay, I’ve packed my suitcase for Istanbul, and I’ve packed my Gurkha knife.” Eliza’s mention of a Gurkha knife broke through one thin layer of resistance.
“I’ve packed my suitcase for Istanbul, and I packed my Gurkha knife and my tennis racquet. Your turn,” Lawton said, swiveling his stool to face Henry.
“I’ve packed my suitcase for Istanbul, and I packed my Gurkha knife, my tennis racquet, and my surfboard.” Lawton won the game of Istanbul, Venice, and Vienna and was battling with Henry for London with his string of cowboy boots, camel saddle, snow globe, rabbit’s foot, yo-yo, violin, water pistol, peacock, soccer ball, skateboard, drawing pencil, jelly beans, sand dollar, Coca-Cola, pocketknife, whistle—when their food arrived.
“Be careful, sweetheart,” the waitress said in a thick Georgia accent. “The fries are real hot.”
“So tell me, how is your research on Henrietta Johnston going? Have you come any closer to identifying the sitter in Mrs. Vanderhorst’s picture?” Henry asked.
“I haven’t found anything to help me identify the sitter yet, but I’ve learned some fascinating bits about Johnston. Her first husband, who was the son of an English lord, died ten years after they were married. Her second husband was an Anglican clergyman who was sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to Charleston to serve as minister of St. Philip’s. He found the people of Charleston ‘headstrong’ and ‘gidday’ and wrote back to England that they were the most ‘seditious people in the whole world.’ Henrietta drew portraits in crayons, or pastels as we would call them now, to supplement his income. At some point, she went back to England to plead with the church authorities for more income for her husband. Her ship was captured by pirates, but eventually she was released.”
At the mention of pirates, Lawton put his cheeseburger down and turned to Eliza. “What happened to the pirates?”
“I don’t know, I guess they took what they wanted and sailed away. I wish I could find an account she’d written about the pirates.” Eliza reached over and took a French fry from Lawton’s plate. “I bet you could identify them for me. There are so many parts of Johnston’s life that I wish I could find more about. For example, Henrietta and her husband adopted a young Yemassee Indian boy and sent him to boarding school with their two sons back in England. I keep hoping I’ll come across a drawing of him—he was named Prince George, but I guess there’s a reasonable chance she never drew him, because she couldn’t afford to use her art supplies on sitters who couldn’t pay.”
“I am surprised there isn’t more at the Library Society,” Henry said.
“They have quite a bit in their archives—eighteen boxes, in fact. They have all the papers of Margaret Simons Middleton, who wrote the only book on Johnston, in the mid-1960s. They have a brief file on Johnston, but all I found were two letters, one with a reference to her husband’s ill health, the other a mention of their need for money, but no mention of portraits being painted. I’ve gone through all the microfiche they have of the newspapers published in the 1700s in Charleston. I was hoping I might find an ad for portraits, but the earliest paper they have on record is 1778. I didn’t know that Charleston had so many different publications—most didn’t last longer than a couple of years, or at least that’s all the Library Society has.”
“My father collected copies of old Charleston newspapers. He had them framed in his office. I should have shown them to you the other night. His favorite copy was one called The Daily Evening Gazette and Charleston Tea-Table Companion. I don’t think it lasted more than a few months.”
The waitress returned and refilled Henry’s water glass and asked Lawton if he wanted another Coke.
“So what’s next?” Henry asked.
“I have a few more boxes to go through. What I’ve looked at is not well catalogued, so
maybe something will turn up.”
“What about the Historical Society? They may have something.”
“As soon as I finish at the Library Society, I’m going over there. They have all the Guignard and Vanderhorst family papers. I’m hoping to find some mention in a letter or will. I spoke to Claire Coker, who was in my class at Ashley Hall—she’s now the head librarian. She said she thought someone had already gone through the archives recently. Claire thinks it may have been someone working for that art dealer from New York, Peter Marshall. She was going to try to find out. It doesn’t really matter, I still have to go through everything myself.”
“And if you don’t find anything?” Lawton asked.
“Well, I haven’t thought quite that far, but then I guess I’ll look at all of the portraits by Johnston that I can locate to compare them to Mrs. Vanderhorst’s portrait.”
“How was your meeting with Helen?” Henry asked.
“Good, she showed me her files. She said that the Gibbes has three portraits, and she’ll arrange to get them out of storage for me. She wants me to bring Mrs. Vanderhorst’s portrait to compare it and to examine it under a black light. When she gets back she said she’d check with several of the owners of Johnstons to see if I can contact them.”
“You know who has a portrait?” Henry said. “Randolph Porter. I think it’s considered to be quite a good one. Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen him. He has an enormous Irish wolfhound that he walks every morning and afternoon. Randolph used to teach classics at Sewanee. He retired here four or five years ago. I met him when Lawton and I used to play tennis at Moultrie. On his walks around the lake, he always stopped and said encouraging things to Lawton. He bought DeRosset Simons’s old house on Beaufain Street. Randolph grew up in Spartanburg, but his family is originally from here. His grandmother was a Prioleau. I’ll call him for you. My guess is he’ll be very helpful if he can.”
Charleston Page 14
