Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “Does she want to start being his mother?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if Issie is married or has other children. I really don’t know anything except that she’s asked for a meeting with me next week.”

  They sat together without saying anything.

  Eliza searched for the sounds of birds, but she could not hear anything. She felt as if all the relationships were being readjusted, and she feared her rapport with Lawton was in danger of slipping away. She didn’t know what to say. Henry moved close to her and cupped his hand around the arch of her foot. “Eliza, I can’t imagine my life without you.” He leaned over her and took his watch from the bedside table. He checked the time. “I’ve got to get to the office. The owners of the paper in New Orleans are coming in this morning to sign all the documents. I offered Mr. Porcher a tour of our offices.”

  Henry picked up a tie that had fallen on the floor. Eliza watched him measure one side against the other. He pulled the ends down until the wide end was six inches longer than the narrow end. “Mr. Porcher told me that he and Edward McGee’s father were roommates at Sewanee.” Henry wrapped the wide end around the narrow end twice. “When Edward learned that we were buying The New Orleans Gazette, he wrote to Mr. Porcher and sent him his articles. Fortunately Mr. Porcher thinks Edward’s ideas are not worth the paper they are written on—direct quote.” Henry pulled the knot tight and centered it and looked up at Eliza. “We’ll get through this.”

  “I know, it’s just—why now, you know?”

  He bent down and kissed her, squeezed her arm, and said, “I know.”

  THE RAIN HAD DISSIPATED INTO A SOFT MIST. AS ELIZA LEFT the garden, she heard the sweet hollow call of a mourning dove. She walked down Legare Street and watched an old blue station wagon pause in front of each house as an arm tossed a newspaper over the car with the precision of a juggler in a circus. Three runners passed, their feet slapping at the wet pavement, sounding like conversations, and disappeared down the street. At the bottom of Legare Street she turned east. Eliza concentrated on the sounds of the birds—she counted seven different ones—that ranged from plaintive calls to husky chirps, from high twills to low-pitched twitters. As she walked down South Battery toward her house, clouds, opaque and blue and tinted with the palest lavender around the edges, covered half of the sky.

  BY MIDMORNING, ELIZA WAS AT HER DESK AT THE HISTORICAL Society with the last six boxes of the Vanderhorst’s family papers stacked beside her on a gray trolley. When Claire tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she were all right, Eliza looked down at the table and saw that the same folder had been opened for a long time. “Yes,” Eliza said, “I think it’s just the heat. I think I’ll leave and come back tomorrow.”

  On the corner of Tradd and Legare, Eliza swung wide around a large, slow-moving herd of tourists who looked over each other’s heads in different directions, as if searching for a sign to appear. Their tour guide, practiced at such maneuvers, had stopped in front of the Sword Gate House and had begun to tell them the story of how the crossed swords were originally made in 1838 for the city’s new guardhouse. Eliza slowed down to listen. “From 1819 through 1848, Madame Talvande kept a select academy for young ladies in the large house beyond the imposing gates,” the guide revealed. “Her ghost is sometimes seen on the third-floor piazza looking down at the garden.” The tourists all looked up to the third floor. As she passed, Eliza looked through the gates to see if Joe were sitting, as he always did, in the wicker rocker on the first-floor piazza. She did not see him and wondered where he had gone.

  ELIZA WAS PACKING SOME OF HER THINGS WHEN SHE HEARD a knock on the glass-paneled carriage doors. The door opened, and Anne de Liesseline’s voice called her name.

  “Oh, Eliza dear,” she said and clasped her hands together, “I was hoping I would find you here. You aren’t going off again?”

  “No, I just need to bring some things over to my house.”

  “Here, let me help you. I’ll give you a lift, but only if you promise to come with me. I want to show you Sallie’s portrait. I finished it last evening, and I want you to see it. I want your honest reaction.”

  Looking at a portrait of Sallie Izard was the last thing Eliza wanted to do, but she found herself waiting for Anne to move a collection of maps from the front seat to the back of her car. Anne’s car was an old unidentifiable model. She didn’t believe in air-conditioning, so they headed for the Cooper River Bridge with their windows down and the air rushing past them. It suited Eliza. It was so noisy that it was impossible to talk without shouting. They ascended over the high arches of the twin spans of the Cooper River Bridge that connected the peninsula of Charleston to Mount Pleasant.

  Anne’s family had owned Landgrave Point, the land on the southeastern tip of the Isle of Palms, for as long as anyone could remember. In the early 1900s her grandfather had paid fishermen to bring huge piles of rocks to dump along the shoreline to fortify the land from erosion. The result was this glorious crescent of land surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Anne’s father had somehow managed to get an old train car from one of the luxury trains and had it transported to their land. It was where he and his friends would retire and smoke cigars and play poker on Saturday evenings during the summers when most of Charleston had moved into beach houses on the adjacent Sullivan’s Island.

  As they pulled into the driveway, Anne asked Eliza if she remembered coming out to Landgrave Point.

  “Vaguely,” she said, “with my father. I remember the train car.”

  “Yes, that’s still here, right over there,” she said, pointing to the vintage train car shaded by several large oak trees.

  “So it survived Hurricane Hugo?”

  “Just. Hugo flipped it on its side, but other than that, it was okay. It’s monstrously heavy. We had a dickens of a time getting it upright. My aunt Louisa used it as a study. It’s where she wrote all those horrendous novels that had pictures of southern belles with their torn-off-the-shoulder gowns on the cover and some columned white plantation house smoldering in the background. I’d always see them in the racks next to the checkout counters at the Piggly Wiggly. It would have pleased us all so much if she’d used a pen name or at least her maiden name of Carter. But she was beyond thrilled with her success. Louisa de Liesseline. Big yellow letters splashed across the front covers. You know, your father used to stop by sometimes in the summer. I remember the day he designed that studio for me on a paper napkin,” she said, pointing to the tall squarish building positioned on the north part of the land. “If I remember correctly, you were with him. You were very little. Come, let me show you.”

  Anne searched her purse for her keys. “Design may be too strong a word for a one-room studio, but he drew the most wonderful large window facing north. His sense of proportion was perfect. Every time I open this door, it makes me a little sad that he never saw what I built from his sketch.”

  Anne pushed the door open, and Eliza stepped into a double-heighted room with a large north-facing window that reached from the top of the cornice to two feet above the floor. The ceiling and floor were painted black and the walls white. Anne’s work was scattered around. There was a long table with brushes and paints laid out in order, and in the corner was a tall white sculpture of a shrouded woman holding a baby upright in her arms. The portrait was positioned on an easel at the other end of the room. It was large—three-fourths life size. Anne had painted Sallie as she had requested—as a mermaid. Sallie Izard sat on a rock with her tail curled to the side and around her were mysterious wild vines and tangles. Behind her was a pond that Eliza assumed was the swimming pool she had converted for her turtles. Anne had chosen the medium of watercolor, and the green and blue and violet colors blurred and ran into one another as if the canvas had not finished drying. Sallie’s eyes were painted with bold black smudge strokes and underlined in a liquid pale green. Her lips were a watery pinkish red that faded into the pale color of skin, and on one cheek was a rectangle of red that faded t
o pink and then to nothing.

  It made Eliza smile. “Anne, it’s really good. The technique reminds me a bit of Francesco Clemente’s watercolors. I have to say that, when you first told me about it, I thought it would be, well, rather . . .”

  “Horrible.” Anne finished Eliza’s sentence. “I know. I don’t blame you.” Anne walked around it and looked at it from several angles. “But I am rather pleased with the way it turned out. Sallie was adamant that she be painted as a mermaid, and I finally gave in and thought, well, here goes. Oh, here, let me make us some tea.” Anne disappeared out the back and returned with a handful of leaves. “My own tea,” she said. “I smuggled some back from Italy. Verveine.” Eliza watched as Anne brewed a pot of tea and then cooled it with ice.

  “You may have met the McMasters at my party—the couple who bought my great-aunt’s house on Meeting Street. Or maybe you had already left by the time they arrived. Anyway, Angela has already spoken to me about painting a portrait of her girls. A painting of her three girls would be lovely over the fireplace in Aunt Zenobia’s house, but I haven’t had the nerve to show her this portrait. I’m afraid it will scare her off. Angela thinks she knows exactly what she wants—her three little girls in front of an arrangement of fruit. The trick for me is to find some twist she doesn’t even recognize—it’s the only way I’ll be able to stay engaged.” Anne handed Eliza a glass of iced tea and walked to the window and pointed to the tip of the property, which jutted out into the water. “We can sit down under those palmetto trees on the point. There’s always a breeze there.” As she led the way, they stopped to watch two shrimp boats slowly making their way back to their berths at the Shem Creek marina.

  ELIZA ASKED ANNE TO DROP HER OFF AT THE FOOT OF Church Street. As she pulled over and stopped, she patted Eliza on the shoulder and said, “I ran into Henry. He needs you right now. He’s not the least bit interested in Isabel. She is absolutely mad. She’s a distant cousin, and my father always said, you know those Lartigues are as crazy as June bugs. No matter what she thinks now, she won’t stay in Charleston long. She won’t be able to take it here. Eliza dear—it’s the wrong turns in life that get you—if you let them. Pain is bad, but regret is worse.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHEN ELIZA HAD FINISHED UNPACKING HER BAG, SHE surveyed the landscape of her bedroom—no stacks of papers that needed to be organized. No more Magritte, no pages to be proofed, no letters to write. Nothing more to be considered on Bonnard and Williams. No applications to fill out and send off. Just a bound copy of her notes to give to Henry as a late birthday present. She had to see Mrs. Vanderhorst, but after that? She could hear the English voice of her adviser cautioning her that she was making a mistake to leave. His admonition didn’t unsettle her, but just because she had made the decision not to stay in London didn’t mean she had made the right decision to return to Charleston. She took the little lighthouse keeper out of her pocket and placed him on top of her mirrored box. She liked the way he looked, as if he were walking on water.

  And then she heard Henry’s voice calling her from the garden. She raised her window to answer, but he was gone, and then she heard him sprinting up the back staircase.

  “Eliza, God, there you are. I’ve been calling you. Did you hear me? I was worried when you weren’t at the carriage house.” He walked to where she was standing by the window. He rolled up his sleeves and wiped his forehead with his forearm. “Why did you leave?”

  Eliza leaned her shoulders against her bedroom wall and looked down on the canopy of the magnolia tree. “I needed to come back here and start unpacking and getting settled. I had to do it at some point, and I don’t know, well, it just feels safe here. I was going to call you a little later. You left work early?”

  Henry turned Eliza toward him. “Eliza, listen, we’ve gone through the tough part. We can’t change what has already happened. You’re safe with me. You know that, right?”

  Eliza sat down on the bed and smoothed the bedspread with the palm of her hand. “I do. I know. It’s just harder for me than I guess it should be. I feel as if I am jumping off the Ben Sawyer Bridge—only it’s a million times higher, and I have no idea what I am going to do next. It was difficult enough for me to get to the point to believe, I mean, to trust that we should be together. And now that Issie is back—she’s no longer a vague abstraction from the past. I don’t know”—Eliza looked around her room—“organizing everything around me makes me feel as if I, at least, have some control over part of my life. I know it makes no sense, but it helps me. Henry, I’m not going anywhere. You don’t need to worry about me, you have enough to deal with. I just need some time to adjust, that’s all. Maybe you should leave me alone for a while.”

  “Eliza, I’m not going to do that.” Henry sat down next to her and put his arm around her. He reached across her and moved the small figure from the top of her mirrored box to the top of the table. He picked up the box. “Is this your treasure box?”

  Eliza nodded. “It’s where I keep the things my father found and gave to me or things we found together.” She pushed her back against the pillows and took the box from Henry. The pieces of mirror that covered the sides were beveled on the edges. She opened the drawer carefully and laid the pieces on her bed. “A Victorian marble, an eighteenth-century shoe buckle, bits of china, some shards of Indian pottery, pieces of blue and white delftware, a quartz arrowhead, a—”

  “Let me see that.” He reached for the arrowhead. “Quartz. Not from around here. Where did you find this?”

  “On the banks of the Stono. My father and I were crabbing one afternoon, and we found it lying on one of the sandbars. My father said he thought it must have been from Indian traders. He said just what you said—there is no quartz in South Carolina. He guessed that Indians from North Carolina must have come down here to trade. This is my favorite.” Eliza pulled a small wrapped bundle from the back of the drawer. She unfolded the delicate cloth, a child’s handkerchief with the monogram of E, and held up a delicately carved figure of a cat, about the size of a dime. “A little girl’s necklace or a charm from a bracelet.” The cat was carved out of bone, and its eyes and nose were painted with tiny black dots. She handed it to Henry, who turned it over in the palm of his hand and then handed it back.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In our garden. My father was overseeing a trench dug for my mother’s roses, and he gave me the task of sifting through all of the dirt. It was in a layer about eighteen inches below the surface.”

  Henry watched Eliza carefully place all of the pieces back in the box. She knew where each piece went. She closed the drawer and placed the box on top of her dresser. After her father died, the weekend trips to the country stopped. Eliza remembered being upset that her mother had sold their share of the Poinsett plantation to her father’s brother, but she later understood it wasn’t a choice but a necessity.

  Eliza looked up at the map her father had painted of Charleston and the surrounding areas. “My father had his own plane, and he and his brother would fly to different properties to go hunting. I always wanted to go with him, but my mother never would let me, she thought it was too dangerous. And I would always ask my father what it looked like so high up in the sky. So for my seventh birthday, he drew what he saw looking down from the plane. He told me when I went to sleep at night, I could look up, and I would see what he saw when he went flying. I figured if I memorized the images, then I would be the best copilot he ever could have. I’ve forgotten how much it meant to me. I used to get scared at night. And he would come up here and sit in that chair over there and speak to me as if we were in the cockpit together. He would tell me to look down and follow the Edisto—‘See where it widens—that’s Willtown Bluff.’” Eliza pointed to the ceiling to the place she mentioned. “He would tell me about the group of settlers who left England and landed on that spot and first called it New London. He would tell me how they set up plats of land and squares and how children would spend their t
ime looking for arrowheads and shards of Indian pottery, and I would fall asleep dreaming that I was on that treasure hunt with them. After my father died, my eyes would always go to the spot where he died—right there along the Ashley River. We have always assumed that a deer must have jumped out of the woods, and he swerved, and that is why his car crashed into one of those large live oak trees that line the road, but, you know, we will never know. It’s hard—the not knowing.” Eliza was telling Henry things she had told him many times before.

  “Slip over,” he said. He lay down next to her and studied the ceiling with her. He turned to look at her.

  “You know, sometimes an inconsequential thing—even a small mistake—can wreck the rest of your life. It could be driving too fast on a slippery road or falling asleep at the wheel or not turning back in a sailboat when storm clouds appear or trying to swim too far when you are tired. It only takes one small error.” He pushed her hair back from her face. She looked back up at the map. The destruction of a life by one small gesture of motion or mind—Eliza understood that. Even what had happened between Henry and Issie had held—and possibly still did—the potential for destruction and ruin. Second chances were rarely offered, but she and Henry, either through the bizarre randomness of coincidence or the tight control of Fate, had been given one.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHEN ELIZA CALLED, RANDOLPH TOLD HER THAT HE would be delighted to see her and invited her over for afternoon tea.

  Eliza rang the bell at 103 Beaufain Street, and a large dog began barking and jumping at the front door. Eliza heard Randolph’s voice, “Scarlett, shush; shush, Scarlett.” A short, pale man in a white starched shirt and gray linen trousers opened the door. He braced backward on a thick, short leash to prevent the shaggy gray wolfhound from lunging at Eliza.