“Do come in.” Randolph tried to smile, but all of his energy was concentrated on restraining Scarlett. “I’m just going to put Scarlett in the garden.” He wrestled the large dog to the back of the house. Eliza heard Scarlett’s toenails scramble against the hardwood floors. Not certain where she should go, Eliza stood in the hall and waited for Randolph. She heard a back door open, more scrambling, and then the door slam shut.
Randolph returned. “I must apologize for Scarlett. She’s still a puppy, and she gets so excited whenever I have visitors. I’ve just registered her for obedience class, but class doesn’t start until September.” He held out his arm toward the parlor. “After you.” He beamed and waited for Eliza to pass in front of him. “I’ve always had wolfhounds, but Scarlett is the most rambunctious one I have ever had.”
Eliza walked into a small room painted a dark crimson and furnished with a large Victorian settee, four matching chairs, and a piano. It was a room Jamie would have described as “overfurnitured.” With a hopeful expression, Randolph asked Eliza if she would prefer sherry or tea. When Eliza turned and said, “Tea,” the hopefulness left his face, and he returned with a tray set for tea and a tiered plate of petits fours.
“So Henry tells me you’re researching Henrietta Johnston.”
“Yes,” she said. “Mrs. Vanderhorst has a pastel drawing that she thinks might be by her but isn’t sure.”
“It’s not signed, then?”
“No, it’s not. I brought a photograph of it.” Eliza opened her notebook and handed Randolph the image tucked inside the front cover.
Randolph pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and adjusted them on his face. He studied the image. “It’s lovely,” Randolph said. “There’s no family history about the picture?”
“No, none that is known. It was passed down in Mr. Vanderhorst’s family and has always been attributed to Johnston, but Mr. Vanderhorst didn’t know who the sitter was.”
“Curious,” Randolph said and gave her back the photograph. “Sugar, lemon?”
“Just lemon.”
Randolph handed Eliza a cup of tea. “Most of the ones I’ve come across, the sitter is known. Of course, I’m sure you have read Margaret Simons Middleton’s book.”
Eliza nodded. “I even looked through her files at the Library Society.”
“May I tempt you?” Randolph offered Eliza the plate of petit fours. “The ones with the sugared violets on top are my favorite.” After Eliza had chosen, Randolph helped himself to two. “I suppose there are no record books where Johnston made notes?”
“No, none that are known. And I haven’t come across anything to suggest she might have kept a record. All I’ve found of Henrietta Johnston are a couple of letters she wrote, but she doesn’t mention anything about her art. Her letters mainly deal with needing money. I’ve checked the newspapers and some family papers of people who sat for her. I’ve looked through all of the Vanderhorst family archives at the Historical Society. I was hoping to find a will or letter that might mention the portrait, but I haven’t found anything yet.”
Randolph pinched his forehead with his thumb and index finger. “Vanderhorst is a Dutch name, but William had a number of ancestors who were French Huguenots. Johnston was descended from French Huguenots, her maiden name was . . .” Randolph tapped his forehead with his fingers.
“De Beaulieu.”
“Exactly. And a number of her sitters were also French Huguenots.”
“Mrs. Vanderhorst said that Mr. Vanderhorst thought she might be one of the Guignard daughters who married into the Bruneau family.”
“Now that is very interesting. If I remember correctly, William’s maternal grandmother was a Bruneau, and before the Revolutionary War that family owned a vast plantation on the Santee.”
“Yes, they did, but then something happened, and they all disappeared. Mrs. Vanderhorst thinks that part of the family either died off with yellow fever or lost their fortune after the Revolutionary War. I looked through what the Historical Society had on both the Guignard and Bruneau families.”
“Nothing?”
“No, nothing in their archives.”
“Hmm,” he said. “And are there no experts on Henrietta Johnston?”
“Helen Halsey at the Gibbes was helpful. She is knowledgeable, but it’s not really her field. She thinks it, very likely, could be a Johnston, but is quick to say her opinion should not be relied on.”
“I suppose there really is no one else.”
“Someone mentioned Peter Marshall but . . .”
Randolph shook his head and scrunched his face into a knot. “Don’t do that. He will tell you it is not a Johnston, and then will go around your back to Mrs. Vanderhorst and try to buy it from her for a song, and then he will come up with some trumped-up research story declaring that it is indeed a Johnston and sell it to some newcomer who wants to own important Charleston pictures.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Eliza said. “Who is he?”
“Peter Marshall?” Randolph asked. “I don’t really know anything about him except that he came down from New York and has developed a reputation for exaggerated attributions and high prices. He got reined in last year when he tried to pass off a portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman as Arthur Middleton, who, as you know, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. One of Middleton’s direct descendants produced a portrait of his ancestor that looked completely different. One had a rather large hook nose, and the other a small straight nose. One had blue eyes, the other black. It wasn’t even close. I had heard that Mrs. Morton had all but signed the check. Peter Marshall has been lying low since that incident. But never mind about him, let me show you mine.”
Randolph left the room and returned with a framed pastel of a young woman with auburn hair, brown eyes, and a fair complexion. “It came from Mother’s side of the family. Her mother was a Prioleau.”
They looked at the drawing together without speaking. The sitter wore a loosely draped blue gown with a narrow inset ruffle and shared with all the other Johnston women unusually large and expressive almond-shaped eyes. As with all the other Charleston portraits Eliza had seen, only the shoulders and head of the sitter were drawn.
“It measures just under eleven by fourteen inches and, I’m told, is the largest size known.” Randolph turned the portrait over and showed Eliza the pastel signature on the rough backing board. ‘Henrietta Johnston Fecit Carolina Anno 1714.’ The fact that yours is not signed is not dispositive. Many don’t have signatures. If the frame got damaged or were changed, the signature and date disappeared.” Randolph handed the portrait to Eliza.
“Mrs. Vanderhorst’s picture is a little smaller than yours,” she said, “but the paper seems to be the same quality and texture, and the colors are very similar.” Eliza leaned closer. “The technique of shading in the background is almost identical. According to Mrs. Vanderhorst, this portrait has never left the Vanderhorst family.”
“Odd that it wasn’t mentioned somewhere in a will.”
Eliza handed the portrait back to Randolph, who propped it up in a chair so they could view it together. “Yes, unless it was given before death.”
“True, true.” Randolph offered Eliza more tea.
“From what I can gather, Johnston’s work in Charleston can be divided into two distinct periods.” Eliza paused to take a slice of lemon. “The first eight years when she was living with her husband in Charleston, and the eleven-year period after her husband’s death. I was hoping to be able to place Mrs. Vanderhorst’s drawing in one of those two Charleston periods as a way of narrowing my search.”
“And?” Randolph offered Eliza the tray of petits fours.
She declined and said, “It doesn’t fit neatly into either one.”
“How so?” Randolph asked, as he waved his hand over the plate of small cakes before deciding on two more.
“In her earlier Charleston drawings, such as yours, the wo
men wore their hair swept up. In her later ones, the women wore their hair down, loosely tied back. The expression of the sitters, the quality of the detail, and even the shading of the backgrounds are much more carefully rendered in the earlier period.”
Ralph considered what Eliza was telling him. “Perhaps after the death of her husband she was very sad and did not have as much time or desire to devote to her drawings.”
“Yes, maybe,” Eliza said. “The quality of the rendering of Mrs. Vanderhorst’s portrait is comparable to yours, yet the hairstyle dates it to the later period.”
“I see. But perhaps it was someone who had been very kind to her, and she was able to give it her best effort.”
“Could be. But then there are the eyes.”
“The eyes?”
“The eyes of the sitter in Mrs. Vanderhorst’s portrait are rounder and larger than the eyes of Johnston’s other women. Even Johnston’s men have the same eyes. When I was in London, I looked at the collection of portraits the National Portrait Gallery has. Before she came to Charleston, Johnston was living in Ireland and drew a group of titled Irishmen, and they all have the same oval eyes. Also in all of the documented Johnstons, the eyes are the same width as the mouth. In Mrs. Vanderhorst’s pastel, the eyes are larger than the mouth.”
Randolph leaned over and picked up his portrait and compared it side by side to the photograph. “Perplexing. But I would think if everything else is similar—the paper, the dress, the colors, the technique—especially the technique—it would be hard to say it wasn’t a Johnston. It would help Kit so much. I just can’t imagine her not living on Tradd Street.”
The reference to Mrs. Vanderhorst as Kit jarred Eliza. Even though Randolph was closer to Mrs. Vanderhorst’s age than to hers, Eliza could refer to him by his first name whereas parents of childhood friends would forever be addressed formally. She asked Randolph what he meant by his last comment.
“Well, I hope I am not talking out of school”—Randolph leaned forward and lowered his voice—“but I think everyone knows. Kit is going to have to sell her house. Whatever William left her is all but gone, and well, you know how expensive these old houses can be.”
“What will she do? Where will she go?”
“Do you know Marianne Bowman who is in charge of the Confederate Home on Broad Street? She does the flowers at St. Michael’s, and she told me she could find a little apartment there for Kit. The apartments are primarily for artist studios, but its founder, Amarinthia Snowden, was Kit’s great-great-great-aunt on her mother’s side, so Marianne can slip her in.” Randolph handed the photograph back to Eliza. “You know, Eliza, Charleston needs someone like you. You know better than I how Charleston is filled with stories. No one here can bring this sort of scholarly analysis to all of, well, our lore.”
Eliza thanked him. “For the moment, I think I have my hands full.” She kept her mind steadied and stopped on “for the moment” and did not let herself think past the phrase.
Eliza left Randolph’s house and rode her bicycle up Meeting Street to the Gibbes. With Randolph’s picture so fresh in her mind, she wanted to look at the three Johnstons the Gibbes had on reserve for her.
An hour later Eliza left the Gibbes. She walked around the side of the museum where she had locked her bike. A car line had formed outside the museum’s annex. Mothers waited for children to be dismissed from afternoon art classes. Eliza overheard fragments of sentences about the Junior League auction planned for late October and the upcoming election at the Garden Club. Just as the bells of St. Michael’s marked the late afternoon hour, a line of traditionally dressed young children emerged holding plaster medallions in the shape of hearts painted in blues and greens and pinks and strung with a ribbon. They marched forth as if transporting newly hatched birds in the palms of their hands. Eliza waited for them to pass before she moved her bike out into the street. The air was heavy and reminded her of the summer refrain she had grown up hearing, that “the air was so thick, you could cut it with a knife.” As the summer moved toward the middle of August, the afternoons would be broken by thundershowers that washed the air of its heaviness.
Eliza was still thinking about the three Johnstons she had just examined, when she saw Issie. She was walking across Broad Street. Issie looked as Eliza had remembered her—slender, curvy, with long, wavy, dark blond hair tied back with a scarf. A feeling of dislocation and alienation stunned Eliza. Lawton was Issie’s son. He looked like Henry, but he had his mother’s thick wavy blond hair. The three of them would always share something she could never be a part of. Issie was dressed in jeans and a white tee shirt. She had always been beautiful, but as beautiful as she was, she never seemed to notice. Even now as she walked across the street, Eliza saw how people turned to look at her. Fifteen years ago, Town & Country had done a feature on Charleston, and they had chosen Issie for the cover. The magazine had used an image of her in a pale blue, silk taffeta ball gown being escorted by several Citadel cadets across Summerall Field. Whether the photographer had asked her to or not, Issie had mischievously kissed her escort on her right, and that was the image the magazine had chosen.
Issie stopped in front of an old dark blue Mercedes coupe and searched her satchel for her keys. There had always been something slightly wild and lost about her that made men want to claim her.
Eliza paused her bicycle and pretended to look at the sweetgrass baskets that the flower ladies were selling outside of St. Michael’s Church. Eliza reversed her direction and walked her bicycle west on Broad Street past the building where the Piggly Wiggly used to be—now replaced by a large art gallery selling bright pictures of palmetto trees and marshes and dreamy skies—and past the formerly run-down facade of the plumbing firm Mr. Julius E. Smith and Sons that had been restuccoed and painted a strong stone color and turned into a private office. The sight of Issie had made everything Eliza had been thinking about disintegrate.
At home, Eliza unpacked her notes from the afternoon and organized them into a neat stack on the kitchen table. She walked outside and sat in the garden and listened to a lawn mower’s drone, a car door slamming, a mother calling her children to come inside for supper. She needed to hear Henry’s voice.
“I am sorry, but Mr. Heyward is in a meeting.” Eliza did not recognize the woman who answered the phone.
“It’s Eliza Poinsett. He asked me to call him. Do you think he will be long?”
“I really couldn’t say. I can have Mr. Heyward return your call when he is finished.”
“May I speak to his secretary?”
“Dorothy’s just stepped away. Oh, no, wait, here she is.”
Dorothy answered the phone, and Eliza asked her if she thought Henry would be long. He had asked her to call him. Dorothy paused for a moment, as if considering what to do, and then whispered into the phone. “He is with Miss Lartigue, and she seems very upset.”
Eliza returned to her spot in the garden. She thought about that Sunday in June when she had entered the house at Oakhurst and how unnerved she had felt and how Henry had talked about things that had nothing to do with her as a way of trying to make her feel safe. Was that what he was doing now—not telling her things that might unnerve her? Weren’t they past all of that? She knew there were no more smooth surfaces. Nothing could be perfect anymore. She had to stop hoping it could be. She couldn’t even pretend. But she didn’t doubt Henry—that was the most important thing. He had done his penance, he had stayed in Charleston and taken responsibility for the consequences of a wrong decision. And his love for Lawton had made her believe in him beyond where she had before. The most they could hope for was a chance to continue. She had to stop looking for order and perfection where it could not exist. The point was to keep going forward. She was still sitting outside when she heard Henry call her name.
“Eliza. Didn’t you hear the phone? I thought you were going to call me.”
“I did, but you were tied up.”
“Next time ask Dorothy to interrupt m
e.” Henry turned and looked at the garden and then turned back to Eliza. “Did you see Randolph? Did his picture give you any clues?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Eliza, what’s wrong?”
“When were you going to tell me that Issie came by your office?”
Henry sat down next to Eliza. “Oh, Eliza, is that what’s bothering you?”
“You didn’t tell me she was coming by your office. Henry, I can’t do this if you keep anything from me.”
“I didn’t know she was coming. She just showed up.”
“She just showed up?”
“Yes. I was waiting to hear back from her lawyer about a day next week. Issie came by without my knowing and asked to see me.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She said she’s considering moving back to Charleston and wants to meet Lawton.”
“And you told her?”
“I told her we should be very careful about him.”
“What did she say?”
“She was surprisingly controlled. She said she understood, but that she was his mother and that she had the right to see him. I told her I was sure we could work something out, but that we should be careful. I also told her she should be sure of what she was deciding because it would be devastating to Lawton if she came back and then decided to leave a few months later.”
“That was all?”
“That was about it. She said her lawyer would be in touch to set up a meeting, and then she left.”
“Did she mention me?”
“No, and I didn’t volunteer anything.”
Eliza picked a leaf from a gardenia bush and folded it in half along its stem.
“Eliza, sweetheart, listen, Issie is Lawton’s mother.” Henry put his hands on her shoulders. “You have to listen to me. Issie is Lawton’s mother, and I have to deal with that for him. She is a very fragile person. Her mother committed suicide when she was fourteen. Life hasn’t broken her way. And I’m not going to do anything to make things worse for her. I just can’t.”
“I know. I know. I do. I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time. When I saw you, I had planned to tell you how dear Lawton’s battlefields were, that I understood why you had left all those plastic soldiers and horses on the floor, why you weren’t able to put them away.”
Charleston Page 20
