by Hadley Hury
One of Anna Quindlen’s professional precursors, journalist Adela Rogers St. John, was asked in her early seventies, during a television interview, if she was afraid of dying. She answered quickly, “Oh, no, not at all. It’s just that I want to see how it all turns out.” Quindlen, Franklin, Streep, Hurt, and Zellweger argue an unsentimental, and therefore all the more deeply moving, case for the importance of making “it turn out.”
On a daily basis.
A keeper, he judged, and with little or no revision.
He went to bed early and read for nearly two hours, putting the book aside from time to time, simply lying there, listening. An owl somewhere in the trees over the lagoon occasionally struck a contrapuntal rhythm with a couple of frogs. Otherwise there was silence; he felt the space of the cottage around him, and he felt time, and he didn’t, for the first time in a long time, feel threatened by either.
Chapter 22
The next evening, he had Charlie and the newlyweds, Libby, Susie, and Camilla over for dinner. Rusty at entertaining, he planned a simple menu: ceviche to start, which he’d prepared before they arrived, to be followed by a simple pasta with vegetables and parmesan.
Sending out a few showers ahead of it, a feeble but nonetheless very welcome cool front had glided through around six, and now, an hour later, Hudson was able to sit on the porch waiting for his guests without ruining his freshly laundered polo shirt. He had, almost with a feeling of inconvenience, eschewed what was becoming a basic uniform of old khaki shorts and a tee shirt for a decent pair of baggy cream-colored pants. The thermometer outside the kitchen window showed the temperature had dropped from eighty-eight to an invigorating seventy-two.
“Auspicious,” he said to Moon.
Even Olive, who usually took her fresh air only in the early morning, had sensed that it might be reasonable to leave her air-conditioned domain, and lounged at the top of the steps, nudging her nose delicately into the gentle breeze that stirred the oaks. A fat drop of water from the eave of the cottage striking the top of her head startled her momentarily but she recovered quickly, shifting almost imperceptibly to one side and grooming behind her ears as if she’d ordered up the unexpected shampoo from room service.
As he waited, Hudson finished reading a story by Alice Munro he had not known and, as he breathed deeply of the cool wetness, he saw the evening world in a slightly altered state, with that quickened sense of discovery that can occur along the border between art and life. He lay the book aside on the small table and watched the light change in the rain-clean gloaming.
Back behind the house and the woods beyond, far down the beach and out over the water, a fairly magnificent sunset must be transpiring. The air, cleansed of the sluggish heat, took on a limpid radiance. At the end of the walk, the white crushed shell and sand shoulders of the road beyond were glowing a pale shade of rose, and the tall live oaks that had seemed exhausted earlier in the day now looked strong and vital and stirred with an easy majesty. Louie and Martine looked new, as if perhaps they had just sprung up from magic seeds in the past half-hour, laden with bright mustard-yellow blooms. And everywhere in the yard a vibrant chorus of greens emanated, from the flat ruffles of the scrub oak, the soft pine needles weeping their scent, the yuccas’ fleshy spikes, the magnolia’s leaves no longer brittle and dusty but brilliantly polished, relaxed with moisture.
It occurred to Hudson that it was a fine thing to be sitting on a village porch at the outset of an evening with old and new friends, anticipating a glass of cold white wine and some good conversation, here, in this dream of a cottage, in this out-of-the-way corner of paradise, tucked among its trees, beside the glittering turquoise expanse of the Gulf.
How could it, then, be so hopelessly far from perfect?
But he also felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, extraordinarily grateful. The evening touched him, a cool hand lingering on his face.
***
“You must be livin’ right, Hudson.” Libby was the first to arrive—she had walked—bearing a handful of hawthorn and hydrangeas swaddled in damp paper towels. “Where do you want these? What a gorgeous evening.” They kissed one another on their cheeks and Hudson took the heavy-headed flowers. He found a large square vase that seemed substantial enough and they put them on the table.
“I want you to know that the last time I had people over for dinner and had planned to have little tables on the screened porch and the yard was a mass of dogwood and azaleas and I had chairs all around the garden and had made all these fancy-ass canapés and just every little thing—and it was the end of April thank you very much—I’ll be damned if we didn’t have a completely unforecasted drop to about forty-five degrees at six o’clock with almost a gale blowing.”
Hudson poured himself a sauvignon blanc and a gin-and-tonic for Libby and they went back onto the porch. Libby gave “a woman of a certain age” every possible happy connotation. She wore a long gauzy dress in pale lilac, just the right amount of makeup, good silver jewelry; her soft honey-and-gray hair was caught back on one side with a silver comb. As always, her eyes were kindled with sensuous energy and interest, and her voice was full of shrewd humor.
“I’m sure you adjusted with aplomb,” said Hudson.
“Well, I tried but I’m afraid the effort showed. I had Brad and the bartender we’d hired wrestling all that stuff inside and everything got wet and it was just a big oogey mess. I was having it as a welcoming party for our new young rector and his wife at St. John’s—I got nabbed again for the vestry last year. And I had thought I was just gonna be so calm and collected and show them what a grand gracious lady I truly was.”
She reached over and patted Hudson’s knee and laughed at herself uproariously. “I had an old aunt in Birmingham who was right—she used to say ‘Party pride cometh before destruction.…’”
She paused and fixed her sights on Hudson. “I knew it! This place is good for you—you look so marvelous. Great color. Rested. Exercised. That gorgeous auburn hair.” She paused, sipping her drink. “Brad sends his best. He called last night. Said to tell you he looked forward to seeing you after the Fourth. I told him not to worry about it, that I was gonna run off with you.”
She asked Hudson about his work on the book and what he was reading and which was “homework” and which for pure pleasure. Warming to her voice as most creatures did, Moon had come to sit beside her and she stroked his head and shoulders.
“Where’s Miss Priss?” she asked, looking around the porch.
“She was with us earlier but has retired either to my bed or perhaps to the desk chair in the hall where she sometimes takes light therapy under her favorite lamp. She doesn’t do crowds. And on any given day that might include either Moon or me.”
“I won’t take it personally,” said Libby.
***
Camilla came next, having driven from her house in Seagrove. “It’s good to see you again,” she said to Hudson, handing him a bottle of merlot. “And what a treat, much as I love my work, to have dinner in someone’s lovely home. Hello, there,” she smiled, taking Libby’s outstretched hand.
While Hudson got her a drink, he could hear the two women chatting familiarly. Libby had been thrilled that Hudson was inviting Camilla. “She’s a woman of substance—a godsend to Charlie. Smart and funny. We get together every now and then. And just as nice as she can be. I like her a lot.”
When he emerged from the house with her glass of wine, he thought again, as he had when he’d met her at the restaurant, what a serenely attractive woman she was.
The others suddenly convened at the cottage, Susie, from the north, having walked around the long block from Yaupon Lane, and from the other direction, Charlie and his young relatives. Charlie and Chaz each carried a bottle of something Hudson knew would be very fine.
“We’re being inundated with good wine,” he said to the two women.
“What a horrible fate,” said Libby.
***
They arra
nged and rearranged themselves, at times all together, at times in twos or threes, in an extended cocktail hour that seemed to take its pace, Hudson thought, from the fact that they were only a few days past the longest day of the year. The long twilight, both on the porch and throughout the cottage where only a few lamps were lighted, was, as Sydney Cullen observed, “magical.”
While Charlie and Libby better acquainted themselves with Susie on the porch, Hudson took Camilla and the Cullens on a tour. Sydney asked all the right questions, with Chaz occasionally joining in. They thought the renovation was “perfect” and said they’d be “tempted never to leave” and wondered where this chair or that fabric had been found. Each had an affinity, in the way of newlyweds, for calling the other “honey.” Camilla didn’t say much. She smiled often, however, reflectively, attentive to what Hudson said and, it seemed to him, how he said it, taking her own measure of the place.
Later, with everyone sitting around the porch—Hudson had brought three extra chairs from inside—the conversation veered to Memphis. Chaz had said to Hudson that, oddly enough, neither he nor Sydney had ever been there, and Sydney pursued this as an open-ended conversational gambit: “What’s it like?”
“Who goes first?” laughed Hudson. “You have three Memphians, two former, one current, here.”
“You’re kidding!” said Sydney, her eyes widening.
“Well,” said Chaz, “I guess Charlie has mentioned that Destin and the area in general do draw a lot of folks from Memphis.”
“Always has,” said Libby. “They were among the first to discover its charms, even before the tourist boom after the War.” She paused. “What Hudson was too polite to say is that you have three generations of Memphians before you.” She looked at Susie. “I’ve just barely met this delightful young woman, myself. I’m the old lady, so I’ll go first. And each of us can say one thing about our hometown, and we’ll just go around a few times and see what we come up with. How’s that?”
“It sounds very interesting to me,” said Camilla. “I’m a North Carolina girl myself and I’ve only been to Memphis once, years ago, for a wedding.”
Susie added, “The good, the bad, the Elvis.”
Hudson laughed, “The dirty laundry…”
“There’s not time enough in this world for that,” said Libby.
“Anyway…” and as Charlie poured more wine, Libby began.
***
“Let’s see. In the springtime Memphis is without a doubt one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’ve seen a few. Your city, of course, is lovely then, too. And Atlanta has hills. Memphis is so flat. But there’s just something about the feel of March and April and May there. The Delta. The earth is so rich and the air is so soft and the world is so alive and green. Everything grows. My mother used to say that there must be something not quite right with anyone who didn’t have a green thumb in Memphis.”
“And there are wonderful old residential neighborhoods with marvelous houses and huge trees arching overhead, and deep wide lawns where white dogwood and crabapples seem to float in the shade like fireflies, with great fountains of forsythia and japonica and Carolina jasmine, and the redbud trees and saucer magnolias and spyrea and viburnum, snowballs and cherry laurels, enormous beds of azaleas and camellias, iris and dahlias. It really is breathtaking.”
Sydney looked at Libby as though transfixed. Chaz, looking first at Hudson and then at Susie, said, “Tough act to follow.”
“Really,” breathed Susie. “You’re up, Hudson.”
“I moved back ten years ago after living for several years in Nashville, and I had lived in New York for awhile, and had work assignments from time to time in Atlanta and New Orleans and Denver. I knew when I returned to Memphis that there were plenty of aspects to living there that I didn’t like. We hear that most people, in some degree or other, have love-hate relationships with their hometowns, and I think that’s particularly true of Memphians. The place evokes subtle passions that can be confused and contradictory. There are days when I know exactly why I moved back and that seems enough. So long,” he made a gesture around the room, “as I can get away from time to time. And there are days when I become extremely impatient, disgusted even, with how narrow and provincial and backward and mean it can be.
“It doesn’t have the brash cosmopolitan air and healthy sense of humor about it of a Nashville or the energy and money and, pardon me, I mean this well, the sort of heady pretensions of Atlanta. Memphis is not without its sophistications, but they seem diminished, a bit faded, largely of a former era. And in that sense it’s a very nostalgic city, an urban metaphor for everything that’s gone from civilized living. Its newness, like a lot of American cities, is generic and fairly tawdry.
“It’s a city that doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes. A lot of the great trees that Libby just mentioned—the oaks and poplars, maples and hackberrys—are old, and very few people even think to replace them. Hideous planning decisions, driven solely by development greed, are made that ruin the look of the city and no one raises a hue and cry. There’s a pervasive sense of learned powerlessness. The only thing thicker in Memphis than its humidity is its chronic inferiority complex. It accepts metastasizing strip mall development, billboards, and every other sort of urban blight without much of a whimper.
“Most older guard Memphians talk with a sort of mildly irritated indulgence about their city, as if she were an inconvenient relative whom it has fallen their lot to put up with.”
He paused. “There are also some of the kindest people there you’ll ever hope to meet. Good-hearted, generous. Genuinely thoughtful and friendly.”
If Hudson had had any concern about Susie being comfortable enough with these more mature people she’d just met, her eager face now dispelled it.
She took a sip of wine and then took up the thread immediately.
“Memphis is a small town, not a city at all really. Everyone seems to know everyone, or at least know of everyone, else. Or at least think they do. Libby and I just now in—what?—a five-minute conversation, discovered that her father is my father’s second cousin once removed and that we have at least two sets of fairly close family friends in common.” She threw up her hands and giggled. “This is not atypical. Memphis developed as the only sizeable city in the middle of the Delta cotton fields and hardwood forests. I suppose farmers and rural folk for hundreds of miles around thought it was the big city, but those of us who live there know it’s really just a great big small town. Whether rural poor or former landowners, most families are just a few generations out of the country. And I think this common agrarian background blurs some of the lines of economic and racial differences and causes others to loom extremely large. There are a lot of old Memphis families, and some new industry barons, who are incredibly wealthy, and there are also tens of thousands of people living in poverty. High rates of adolescent pregnancy. A functional illiteracy rate of about thirty-three percent.”
She paused and smiled. “But then there’s the music, you know? The great meeting ground for Memphians and our gift to the world. It’s almost always what people ask me about first when they learn it’s my hometown. The blues. W.C. Handy. Alberta Hunter. Elvis. B.B. King. Tina Turner. Jerry Lee Lewis. Stax Records. Gospel. Memphis really has been the melting pot for a lot of American music: hillbilly ballads from the Scottish and Irish settlers in the Appalachians melting into Creole songs from the islands, and African rhythms mixing with European sacred music to produce spirituals. Blues out of slaves’ work songs eventually fusing with Mississippi River jazz and then country with rock. It’s fabulous.”
Susie was wearing her horn-rimmed glasses this evening and looked quite studious. She pushed a stray lock behind her ear, and continued.
“And, of course, there’s the inexplicable fact of our literature. We always resort to the best guess—that we are ‘word people,’ anecdotalists, storytellers by nature. Whatever. But there’s just no getting around that in our general vicinity we
grow great American writers at an amazing per capita rate. Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Taylor, Maya Angelou, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Jesse Hill Ford, Shelby Foote, on and on and on.…”
She paused, and lifted her glass. “I suppose that’s what means the most to me.”
“And to me,” said Hudson, joining the toast.
“Let’s not forget the river!” said Libby. “Now admittedly it’s not a pretty little blue-green sort of thing. It’s huge, sprawling, muddy, a force of nature. But its beauty is in its power, its majesty. In the last ten or fifteen years, Memphis finally seems to have realized it’s its greatest natural resource. I’m delighted to see all those nice houses going up on the island and people converting old storefronts and cotton warehouses into restaurants and clubs and galleries and co-ops and all that. Downtown is at least sitting up and taking notice of itself again. High time.”
“It was wonderful when Brad and I were first dating in the early ’50s. We’d often go sit on the bluffs under the trees and feel the evening breeze come up off the river and watch the sun go down, and then we’d go for a drink and dinner at the Peabody and then on up to the roof garden to dance the night away. Oh, it was so romantic.”
Susie: “Heinous winter weather. Not enough snow and way too many ice storms.”
Hudson: “If you meet the right person—like Libby, for example—one of the most attractive of all Southern accents. If you meet the wrong person, one of the most gratingly god-awful of all Southern accents.”
Libby: “The worst drivers in the country.”
Hudson: “The best barbecue in the country. The only real barbecue, despite what a lot of deluded Texans may think.”
The three of them looked at each other, and then Libby looked at Sydney and Chaz. “Enough! Did that just wear you out?”
***
