by Hadley Hury
“An ‘at-home.’ Sounds great. I’ve got a good white Bordeaux I’ll bring along.”
Hudson turned off the phone and, for several minutes, sat very still, looking at it.
He wrestled yet again with the fact that, despite their history—or, bizarrely, because of it—Charlie now posed such a threat.
It was early afternoon before he narrowed the wooden blinds, turned on the central air, and headed out on a foraging expedition.
As the heat of the day blossomed, Hudson made his more “local” local rounds: the shrimp and some start-up groceries at the good, but wildly overpriced, market in Seaside; then the old liquor store and a stop for gas on Highway 331. There was more traffic than Hudson remembered, enough traffic, even on Scenic 26 between Laurel Beach and Seaside, to make the going slow, though most of it was, mercifully, concentrated around Seaside. It also made Hudson wonder how often he would want to make the twenty-mile trek west, through the beach communities on 98. It would have to be done. Moon had his requirements and most of them came in the large economy size; and though he was, indeed, Olive’s slave, Hudson balked at the notion of paying more for cat food at one pop in the Seaside Market than he had paid the Memphis Humane Society for the cat herself.
***
“…and brought the urban livestock with you,” Charlie mused, considering the paw that Moon had just laid across his bare foot. “You are, as they say, a handsome dog.”
“Well, I considered leaving Olive. They abhor changing homes, you know. A friend was willing to come in three times a week, but that seemed like an awful lot of cat patrol. I’m sure that in another day or two, Olive will be delighted she came and will resume her usual role as life of the party.”
Olive, who was having none of this, glided from under the kitchen butcher block where she had made short work of some shrimp bits. She looked up once, momentarily, at Charlie, as if perhaps he were a curious afterthought. Apparently the late-night tableau of Hudson sprawled in the big chair on one side of the hearth, Charlie in the other, and Moon splayed smilingly between them did not warm the cockles of Olive’s heart, for with a dismissive shake of her head, as if coming to her senses and remembering something far more important in another room, she sidled slowly down the long, wide hallway.
Charlie sank back in his chair, laughing. “Well, you’re not off the hook yet.”
His own longtime companion, Maisie, a yellow lab, had died several months before, peacefully in her sleep at the age of seventeen.
“I have a friend in Dune Allen whose lab is due soon, so I’ll have a new pup on my hands by the end of the summer.”
Hudson got up to lower the CD volume a bit. They were listening, around the edges of their conversation, to the punchy elegance of Art Tatum. He poured a scotch for each of them.
“Well, I’ve probably told you more about the Elliott School and the education of adolescent girls than you wanted to know.”
“Hudson, I am so, so pleased that you’re doing what you’re doing.” He stared hard at Hudson, holding his gaze, and smiled. “It’s where you need to be, isn’t it?”
“Probably. I remember my whole first year I kept thinking it was such a gift. These past two, I’m sure it’s been a necessity. I don’t know….”
“How you would’ve done it?”
“Yes. I mean, I still don’t know how I’m doing, or what I’m doing, or why, but it was pretty essential, I think, to have to show up somewhere every day at eight fifteen and be constantly ‘on’ in the way teaching demands, every minute of the day, with four classes of young faces scrutinizing every turn of every synapse. Waiting for you to talk. Waiting for you to listen. Even when they’re kind, and they were, that age is relentless. About everything. I had no place to hide. There’s nothing like—nothing could’ve been like that. I kept thinking I would implode, just go up in smoke some day standing in front of a class while hearing myself prattle on about the symbolism in Huckleberry Finn or Jane Austen’s humor or something. But I didn’t. In working with fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds, one day becomes the next, imperceptibly; there are no seams. There’s no such thing as time. Especially with the ninth graders. These shrill, gawky creatures stumble into your classroom in September like newborn colts with mouths full of braces, and the roller coaster starts, and the next thing you know they’re these young women, sauntering out in June, new bodies, low voices, good haircuts. God love ’em.”
“They’re very lucky.”
“Maybe,” Hudson said. “I know I am.”
There had been scrutiny—that came with the age group—but there had also been the sweet, innocent, unguarded concern and affection that could leap out of the same girl who only moments before might have acted a brassy brat. They knew how to call it because they didn’t, like adults, weigh their options as thoroughly. They just connected. Thank God the one time he had really lost it was in the ninth grade class. He had tried discreetly to maneuver toward the door and finish some sort of sentence, but hadn’t succeeded on either count. He had come back almost immediately, after dashing some cold water on his eyes and wiping them with his handkerchief. “Excuse me…” he had begun, striding to the front of the class. “Now, we were just…” but before he could get any further, three girls near the front, and within seconds, the entire class of fifteen, had surrounded the lectern quietly, and, one by one, hugged him, some shyly, some crying, some reaching out from their own painful frames of reference, all of them murmuring “We’re sorry, Mr. DeForest, we’re sorry” and “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
***
Hudson had discovered real love late and, as is often true in such cases, found himself profoundly moved by the experience. It at once seemed the most natural thing that had ever happened to him, an unexpected stroke of providence, and, for a strong individualist fairly well set in his ways, surprisingly defining. He was himself, but more so. Life suddenly made much more sense, was so much richer. He bloomed. The world bloomed. Kate—their love—did that.
***
“Tell me about you,” Hudson said.
“Well. I’ve been trying to be a man of more leisure, but I wonder if I have the talent for it.” Charlie chuckled. “Is that what you English teacher types call irony?”
Charlie’s entire career and, more important, his life, had been about helping people enjoy themselves. Now he was approaching sixty-seven at his own elegant pace and Hudson found it hard to believe that he wouldn’t know, as he seemed always to know, exactly how he wanted to go about it. His appearance seemed unchanged. A man of medium height, compact, muscular and trim, he lounged easily in the big chair, one leg hiked over the arm. Thick white hair fell in a mop to one side and sprouted from the neck of his polo shirt. And, what had always come to mind first whenever Hudson thought of him during their occasional phone conversations, the startlingly blue eyes, bright with alertness and humor. Perhaps just the faint tracery of a few new lines around them.
“I almost peeked into the Blue Bar last night, coming back from my walk,” said Hudson. “Looked hopping, as usual.”
Charlie smiled. “The nonstop local pageant of life in Old Laurel. Good drinks, fine family dining, old friends, and just enough pretty young people with the sense to get out of Destin and Santa Rosa for an evening.”
“You’re not planning on giving it up anytime soon, are you?”
“Sometime soon,” he said. “But they may have to lay me up on the bar, torch the whole damn place, drag it across the beach, and set me out to drift.”
“But other than the fact that you live about a five-minute walk away from it and consider it your personal vanity and the pub of your domain, you haven’t been hands-on for awhile, have you? Your manager, Terry?—he’s still with you?”
“Yes. Four years now.” He hesitated, then added, “That’s not bad for these parts. Terry does a good job.”
Hudson remembered him, but only indistinctly, a stocky man, fortyish, with short sandy hair, beard, and wire-rim glasses, a shadow in a
Hawaiian shirt against a still bright evening sky as he and Kate sat on stools along the back bar on the deck sipping ice cold beers.
“No, no. You’ve pretty well got it. I just like to drop in, hang out occasionally. Like you say, the phantom master of the tavern. Local eccentric.”
“You are one of the least eccentric people I know. And 26-A? How much are you there?”
“Oh, that’s still my main enterprise. I go in to my little office at least for awhile just about every day. But I’ve been cutting back. I’ll let go soon. I finally have the manager I’d been looking for. You’ll like her. Camilla Stokes. About your age, maybe a year or two younger. Divorced, kind, patient, a model of efficiency, attractive. Very good-humored. Old guard classy. Just the right air about her.”
“Fentry?”
“Fentry holds forth in the bar. The volume of business is such that it really requires its own oversight. Camilla handles the restaurant. They’re a match made in heaven and I just love them both. We just celebrated his sixth year, a Sunday evening about a month ago. Everyone who was anyone was there. He wore a tux and Victor did Barbadian dishes. You know, Victor’s coming up on his fifth anniversary.”
“How is big Vic?”
“Just the same. All six-foot-four of him right up to his ponytail. Quiet, reserved, soft-spoken. That terrific Aussie accent. And as serious as ever. We’ve given up trying to change that, it’s the way he is, and he’s a sweetheart. He dated a girl in Pensacola last year for awhile but she went back to her former boyfriend. I can’t imagine what that guy had that Victor doesn’t except perhaps a sense of humor. Half the people in the restaurant on any given night would leap across their partners and blissfully offer themselves up to him on a bed of romaine. We worried about him there for awhile. Victor low key is really low key. But he seems to have retreated back into that great calm, that wonderful simplicity of his. When he’s not having his culinary visions he’s still surfing and playing tennis.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it covered.”
For a split second, Charlie looked down and slightly to one side, as if he’d heard or, perhaps, remembered something, but then he returned his gaze to Hudson and gave him his slow, trademark grin. “Yeah, I guess I do. I’m a very fortunate man, Hudson. It’s all pretty perfect, when you think about it. I’ve sold everything else except for a piece of land east of Seagrove. It’s time for some new life, new projects…I’ve been keeping my hand in as much as I want but I think I’m ready now to move on.”
Easy for you, thought Hudson. New life, indeed. All pretty perfect, indeed. On top of the world—this particular stretch of world, anyway. No looking back for you, Charlie.
Instead, with level coolness he said, “But nobody’s had a hand like yours.”
***
Charlie was the only child of a longtime manager of the Louisville Country Club. He learned firsthand the practical operations of running an upscale establishment and, always a quick study in his observations of people, he learned the equally essential subtleties of elegance, charm, and genuine hospitality. Both his parents were of good middle-class stock and had a quiet but distinctive personal style of their own. Nevertheless, the lines of privilege were clearly drawn and, though most of the members treated the personable good-looking boy like part of the family, Charlie realized early and often that he was a poor relation.
Wisely, he refused to feel embarrassment. When he graduated from the University of Kentucky and left for a three-year stint in the Navy, he pragmatically decided that he would use to his advantage his master-level training in the ways and means of the very rich. He would draw on and indeed be grateful for what was, after all, valuable experience, not unlike, say, growing up on a successful farm, or going to law school, or being an artist’s apprentice. He’d had years of it, nearly two decades that had shaped him and showed him that people with wealth and/or breeding enjoy having a good time of a particular sort and in a particular style and that it took a person of a particular sort and with a particular sense of style to make it happen.
In fact, he decided, there was no reason, after such a long period of breathing the atmosphere, minding the details, and enjoying both the technique and the spirit of the process, that he should settle merely for succeeding as a creator of elegant hospitality for wealthy people of taste. He would simply succeed at becoming a wealthy person of taste himself. From his parents he had learned how to manage details with seeming effortlessness, so that the old guard of Louisville would have the pleasures of the club while feeling they’d scarcely left home. He realized he had impeccable taste. With that and his skills he could attain wealth enough, he would do it in his own way, and he would enjoy it. Hence the natural evolution of his joie de vivre and his role as an intuitive host, in life and in business.
His eminent good sense and determination eventually extended to his sexuality as well. On the day he emerged from the Navy, at age twenty-five, he quit trying to mislead himself about his thoughts and desires. He called the phone number in New Orleans of a fellow who had passed briefly on assignment through the Pensacola base a few months before and who had since left the service. It was his first, a very happy and memorable, significant relationship
Having fallen deeply in love with the Gulf, not particularly wishing to return to Louisville, and having no other destination in mind, Charlie settled for a time in Pensacola. He was assistant manager and then co-owner and manager of the town’s best restaurant. He celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday by closing on his first beach rental property out on Santa Rosa Island, and had another within a year. Soon, he turned a large profit on selling his interest in the restaurant, and turned his sights further east, living between his house in the regentrifying East Bay area of Pensacola and a condo in Destin, where he opened a restaurant. In 1970, at thirty-five, he did well on the sale of the restaurant and the two beach properties he’d restored, and left Pensacola, with Andrew, ten years his junior, for Laurel Beach, to make his first real home.
He had always had a deep respect and a zealous concern for those stretches of the Emerald Coast that had managed to escape the first big development boom, from the end of the War up through the late ’50s, and as his real estate interests expanded they never included careless abuse or trashy exploitations of the landscape. He eschewed hotels and motels and concentrated on renovating and building discreetly superb houses, something of an indulgence which was paid for by small, exclusive enclaves of duplex or quadplex condominiums and a couple of small, charming inns, all of which were nearly as elegant as his houses.
When Seaside had begun to develop twenty years ago, Charlie dabbled a bit; it was to his great financial advantage as the village immediately apotheosized into an upscale Southern destination. Hudson didn’t doubt for a moment that Charlie still loomed large as the guiding presence at 26-A, as the doting patriarch behind the Blue Bar, and, in other degrees and fashions, as a force to be reckoned with along a hundred miles of the coast. But in the fifteen years Hudson had known him, Charlie had always handled life, himself, with a lightness, a grace. He had exquisite taste and a generous, almost exhaustive, sense of hospitality that anticipated every detail. But never once had Hudson seen a wheel turning, a pinched face, the slightest betrayal of effort. The man had a finely tuned informality. He liked to smile and he liked to see other people smile. He had been raised to consider manners as real values, foremost among them that no effort should be spared but must never show. He worked all his life to erase the line between working and living and to make it all one, large, marvelous party, for those for whom he cared and for himself.
But now, of course, everything had altered.
***
Hudson asked, “And what are you doing at home?”
Charlie laughed and shook his head. “I could do two days’ work every morning before I leave the house. I swear I think that house grows in the night.” He looked around. “I probably should have a beautiful cottage like this. Just the right size. Right now I’m hip-
deep in painters. My young cousin’s coming for a couple of weeks and I’m using that as an excuse to do the north guest suite.” He paused. “But I do love my home. More than ever.”
They talked on. About the cottage, about the weather, about who had moved in and who had moved out of Laurel Beach and who was renting what, about local politics, until the clock-barometer on the big pine desk in the hall whirred dully, clicked, and feebly bleated out midnight. Kate had found the clock, which she had dated around 1900, at a flea market in Fort Walton and had had everything done to it that could be done. But its creaky wheeze continued, and anything more than three or four o’clock drove him crazy. On the long hours he would look at her, roll his eyes and shake his head like a madman. “Oh, but think of all the stories it brings into our house,” she would say, sometimes making a few little whirring noises of her own just for spite. “Think of all it’s seen.”
He suddenly realized they had, during his reverie, become mired in a long and awkward pause.
“Hudson.”
He blinked hard as Charlie began to speak again, now in a low and very measured way.
“You know I would never presume on your loss. I think we’re very private men, the two of us. But I want to say that I am so glad to see you sitting here in front of me. You look well. I can only say that I know what you’ve been through is all anybody ever needs to know about hell. I knew there was nothing I could do except call and write every now and then. That you’d have to find your way by yourself. I can’t imagine that there’s anything I can do even now. But if there is, if there ever is anything, please let me be your friend. I’ve always known you are a strong man and a good one. I guess I just needed to say, face to face, I’m so, so sorry. And that I hope, even through the pain, you can feel just a little bit like some part of you has come home.”
