by Gail Godwin
“Yes, ma’am, Roberta told me. What time did he usually get here?” I had thought this up in advance.
“If he was flying, he arrived in the late afternoon, because that was the best flight from D.C. He landed at the Myrtle Beach airport and had a rental car waiting. If he was driving down, it all depended on where he stopped the night before and whether he took the direct or the scenic route. One time he arrived before daylight and waked me with a breakfast tray.”
“That was nice of him.”
“It was, though I prefer to be groomed when he first sees me. But he was so pleased with himself that morning he probably overlooked what a fright I was.”
“What did you two do while he was here?” In the deep pocket of my cargo shorts the Grief Cottage photos awaited the right moment to nudge us onto the Johnny Dace subject, but it was way too early in the visit to bring them out. Today a lace cloth covered the porch table and our china and silver were more elaborate. Even the ashtray had undergone an upgrade to a light-green cut-glass crystal, one that matched the crystal pitcher holding our iced tea. The pelican ashtray would have been out of place. In the center of the table was a porcelain cake stand painted with little cupids playing their flutes to branches full of birds. The cake, Billy’s favorite prune-and-bourbon cake, was still in the oven below.
“Well, when I was still on foot, we always went to Brookgreen Gardens. Billy never could get enough of Brookgreen Gardens, even as an adult. You must get someone to take you, Marcus. There are gorgeous flowers and sculptures and boat cruises and a zoo and walkways through woods with rare birds and two-hundred-year-old trees and even alligators. They issue passes that last a week because there is too much to do in one day. As a child, Billy had to be dragged away, and even when he was in his fifties we had to go back and refresh his memories of it. And let’s see. We ate out a lot, even after my wheelchair confinement. Billy liked the local cuisine. And when I took my afternoon nap, he would drive across the bridge to Charleston and shop for antique furniture for his place in Washington.”
“What was it like, his place?”
“Oh, Marcus, I never got to see it! We had been planning my visit year after year and something always interfered. And then finally we got everything right. Billy made all the arrangements, I had a first class ticket, and I was waiting in line at the airport to check my bag when I collapsed on the floor. From then on I was in a wheelchair. My spine had given out. I won’t bore you with details. It’s the great disappointment of my life. For years and years, Billy had been saying, ‘Mama, when are you going to come up here and see how I live and meet my friends? I want you to get to know the Washington me.’ Now I will never know the Washington Billy.”
“What did he do in Washington?”
“He had a highly responsible job with an insurance company that takes care of armed service personnel and their families. He loved his job. This isn’t always true of artistic people like Billy. They feel somehow thwarted if they’re not directly connected to the arts. But he never did. He went right on taking voice lessons and collecting old furniture and going on his little jaunts to France and Italy. He had a beautiful rich tenor voice. People were always asking him to sing at their weddings.”
“Lachicotte’s mother has been gone ten years and he said he knows her better now than when he saw her every day. He said when all the human noise and stuff are out of the way the absent one can spread out and be themselves in your heart. Maybe that will happen with Billy and you.”
“Oh, Marcus, I can’t think of anything I’d like more. How I would love for Billy to spread out and be his whole self in my heart! We know so very little about the people we are closest to. We know so little about ourselves.”
“How is your archaeology on yourself coming along?”
“Oh, you remembered that. What was I saying when we last discussed it?”
“You wanted to get rid of family names and social stuff and strip down to what was below Coral. Or no, you said beyond.”
“I think I like your below better. Well, I’ve hit one or two cul-de-sacs since then and now I am coming to terms with my findings.”
“What are cul-de-sacs?”
“Just a fancy French way of saying dead ends. What am I when I get past being a particular daughter, wife, mother, neighbor, friend? What would be left of the essential me without any of my roles? That was the first dead end I reached. Maybe nothing will be left, I thought; I am my roles. Even when I’m dead I’ll be in the role of ‘Mrs. Upchurch’s remains’ to my undertaker. When people remember me, it will always be in one of my roles. I must say, that took the wind out of my sails.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’ve gone on your archaeology dig and you’ve found some nice coins and jewelry and pottery and you think, oh, if I’ve dug up all this already, the best of all is going to be at the bottom! But then when you get to bottom there’s nothing there but dirt.”
“But you said that was the first dead end, so there must have been a second one.”
“Well, here’s what came next. I just couldn’t accept that there was nothing more to me than who I am in relation to others. What about this consciousness that inhabits my body and nobody else’s, the unrepeatable part of me who experiences everything in the world from its one-of-a-kind viewpoint? After all, every tree in the forest has its one-of-a-kind experience of its own tree-ness. And then I thought about Billy, how he said ‘I want you to know the Washington me,’ and that’s when I came to my second dead end, which was not exactly a dead end but a cause for sorrow. I realized that below all our mes that become known to others is a self that nobody else can ever fully know. No self can ever share its entire being with another self, no matter how much love there is between them. And that made me cry. I had a really good long cry. And after I dried my eyes, I thought, well, what have I got left? And all I had left at the bottom of my digging was love.”
I was debating whether or not to tell her that love wasn’t such a bad thing to find at the bottom, which might have evoked the same bitterness Aunt Charlotte had shown when I had assured her that her wrist would regain its full range of motion. Roberta’s solid footsteps ascending the outdoor stairs beside the “unsightly ramp” deplored by Charlie Coggins saved me from making the choice.
“Here it is.” Roberta slid the fragrant cake from its plate onto the waiting stand. “Four generations of prune cake. That’s right, isn’t it, four?”
“Four indeed. The recipe came down from Archie’s great-grandmother. At first it was baked in ordinary cake pans, then Archie’s mother received a Bundt mold as a wedding gift and ever since it’s been baked as a Bundt cake. The icing was always made with rum until one day they didn’t have any rum in the house so she substituted bourbon, and so this is the cake Archie and Billy grew up on. Roberta, did the tea roses arrive?”
“They’re in the kitchen. I just have to cut the stems and shake in those little packets and we’re good to go.”
“Marcus, I’m going to show you Billy’s room before you leave. You’ll remember, won’t you, Roberta, it’s the apple-green vase.”
“I’ll remember, Miss Coral.”
“She does that ‘Miss Coral’ thing to punish me,” the old lady said once we were alone again. “I shouldn’t have reminded her about the green vase. Of course she remembered. Marcus, help us both to that cake. Don’t be shy. Just pick up that cake server and take the plunge. Make mine a thin slice, make yours a double.”
“Why is it a punishment?”
“I was being lady of the manor, so she backtracked into the bad old days of disparity. We Southerners have a different history, Marcus. It will take a while for us to blend in with the rest of the country. I won’t see it in my lifetime, but Roberta Dumas and I have made our little start.”
She had said “I am going to show you Billy’s room before you leave,” and with that deadline impressed on my mind I brought out the pictures as soon as she lit up her first cigarette in my company, expl
aining about Charlie Coggins showing me the inside of Grief Cottage.
“The distance shots are best,” I said. “They’re for Aunt Charlotte when she starts to paint again. They show its up-to-date damage and she can choose how much of it to put in her pictures.”
“I see what you mean. The shots with the other houses in them are nice. Oh, poor Archie, I can’t see these pictures without thinking how upset he got when he walked up there every summer and saw that thing still standing. He finally shamed them into putting the fence around it—or did I already tell you that?”
“You may have.”
“At my age the short-term memory betrays you more than the long-term one does.”
“The indoor shots are terrible,” I said, spreading them out. “Too dark, and the colors don’t show.”
“I’m surprised Charlie Coggins allowed you to go inside. It can’t be safe at all.”
“Did you—were you ever inside?” My preplanned takeoff question.
“No, Archie and I were not great socializers. His island time in this house was too precious to him. The Barbours were more the rental type of owner than those who kept their houses strictly for their own families. They rented out right through the season, sometimes through October. Those unfortunate Daces were the exception, which of course the Barbours came to regret.”
Bingo!
“I think I told you already,” she went on, “the Barbours got sued by some cousin who said Mr. Dace was the only kin she had left, and they paid up.”
“Did Billy ever go inside the house with … his friend?”
“I expect he must have. Because he reported things the parents said and did. It may have been while he and Johnny were spying from their hiding place.”
“Was it in the house?”
“As I recall, you got there from the outside, but the people inside didn’t know you were so close. Mind you, Billy told me some things he didn’t tell Archie, and that was probably one of them. The parents were out of their element at the beach. The family was from Kentucky, and they’d had some bad luck, which I think I told you before. They were afraid of the ocean and huddled together in one of the Creekside rooms. The father went fishing every morning with the folks who fish from the creek, and the family ate fish and cornbread and some rice and beans they’d brought with them. Billy said Johnny hated his parents. They were too old and wouldn’t let him do anything. He got so hard to manage they put him in this delinquent home several times. Then they would all cry and reunite and try again. Before they came to the beach, Johnny had been suspended from school. Billy told me—this was later, after the hurricane, when everyone had heard about the family’s disappearance—that he had been going to send Johnny the bus fare so he could run away to Columbia. They had it all planned. Johnny would go to public high school with Billy. Lord knows where they thought Johnny was going to live! Funny, I had forgotten about those plans till you stirred up my memories with all your questions.”
Coral Upchurch shot her wondrous machine into action for our excursion to Billy’s room. What a great ride it would offer if you were sure of getting out of it again. Its sissing sound rose in pitch the faster it went, and it took sharp corners better than we did.
Billy’s room was everything someone like Billy—or what I had come to know of him—would feel entitled to. The ocean was right outside the sliding doors, which were open to let in the breeze. The bed was made and turned down with crisp linens. There was a chintz-covered armchair with matching hassock and the prettiest writing table I had ever seen. I would have said more if I hadn’t used up too many superlatives on the cake. On the desk was a framed studio picture of a young man with flowing hair and perfect features. Everything in his countenance testified to expecting nothing in life other than unqualified admiration. “Billy’s about twenty in that picture,” said Coral. “Isn’t he handsome? That’s an antique Provençal desk, Billy had it shipped here direct from France.” On the desk was the apple-green cut-glass vase full of pale orange roses in bud.
“I’ll leave y’all to yourselves,” said Roberta Dumas.
“Before you go, tell Marcus what we did with your Boogie Basket,” Coral said.
“Thanks to her I sent back my commission money to those folks, and now we have ourselves a great big sweet-grass laundry basket,” said Roberta, laughing softly as she went.
XXXV.
The period of time following my afternoon with Billy and Coral Upchurch and leading up to Aunt Charlotte’s return date with the surgeon had a mournful feel. Some things were drawing to an end, other anticipated things had not happened. For me it was a time of flat days and anxious thoughts. The sun rose later and set earlier. It was as if the summer knew that its best days were gone and was giving in without a fight. I continued my morning rides to Grief Cottage, wearing my helmet and ducking my head as I hurried past the final few cottages in case Pickett happened to be looking out. There was nothing going on with the ghost-boy, no sense of my being seen or heard. My visits to the cottage were so blank that I began questioning the relationship I’d had with him before going inside with the realtor. It was as if Charlie Coggins’s sky-blue paint to ward off Ole Plat-eye had driven away my ghost. I still talked to him, updated him with alluring trues (“Billy Upchurch’s mother said he invited you to run away from home and go to school with him in Columbia … she said you two had a hiding place where you could spy on the people inside … I missed the turtles’ boil because I had to clean up after this boy who left a mess in our bathroom, but I did get to see them racing for the ocean…”)
Not a flurry in the air between us, no vibrations of either interest or disgust, just a boy by himself on a rotting porch disturbing the peace with his human noise.
Ed Bolton had apologized. (“The boy was at loose ends and I thought it would be exciting for him. But you got the short end of the stick.”) Ed had returned to Aunt Charlotte’s dune to clean out the nest and count the little corpses and unopened eggs and carry them away to the sea turtle conservators for research. (“I’m sorry, Marcus. And Pickett was mortified, for what it’s worth.”)
I missed talking to the turtle eggs and sorting out my day. Their presence had been an aid to my meditations.
Coral Upchurch had overtired herself with Billy’s “welcome home” celebration and had taken to her bed. I still went over daily to get their list, but there wasn’t much on it. I asked Roberta had I done anything to tire her. “No, she’s getting down to her real grieving. Lord knows it’s about time.” Roberta was weaving an elegant bread basket of modest size.
Aunt Charlotte and I still had our evening meal together, though she ate less and less and I opened more bottles of wine. Sometimes when she asked me to open another one, she gave me this measuring look like she was seeing how close she was to goading me into “nagging” so she could counterattack with her “Just do it, Marcus.”
I told her about Coral’s “welcome home” for Billy. And about her collapse at the airport, which kept her from ever seeing how her son lived in Washington and meeting his friends.
“Did it ever occur to you that she might not have wanted to see how her son lived in Washington and meet his friends?”
I said no, it hadn’t.
“People have so many ways of shooting themselves in the foot to avoid facing something.”
These days her supper talk bristled with this kind of caustic observation. After that one, I asked myself if her kitchen mishap had been a means of not facing up to something. And if so, was she aware of it?
Lachicotte took me to his barber for a haircut—I had asked for this after meeting Pickett. The barber wanted to know how I would like it, as it was too long for him to make out the “line” of my last haircut (which the foster mother had given me). I said short on the sides and in back but leave a little fringe brushed sideways at the front. You could dislike someone and still admire their hairstyle. Then we went shopping for school clothes, which I knew how to do, so Lachicotte sat on a bench outside
the store while I let Mom’s taste guide me through the Boys section. Trendy is soonest out-of-date. Wear your clothes, don’t let them wear you. They should fit your body, not be tight or baggy or out to make a statement. Go for the well-made things—as far as your budget allows. When I summoned Lachicotte so he could pay with his credit card, to be reimbursed by Aunt Charlotte, he said he’d expected me to spend more. I felt sad Mom wasn’t around to see how well I’d done.
While trying on clothes in the dressing room, I had scrutinized myself in the full-length mirror and pretended to be others at school watching me come down the hall. The beach and the bike riding had definitely improved the basic shape. Stripped down to my underwear I examined myself front and back from haircut to feet. I was not the boy that my mother had last looked upon. I was definitely on the road to manhood. Was this something to look forward to?
What had I looked forward to this time last year when Mom and I had been shopping for back-to-school things? If the patch of black ice had been somewhere else instead of under of her tires what would we be doing right now? We would probably still be in our upstairs apartment in Mrs. Wicked’s house on Smoke Vine Road. I would be pudge-wonk going into eighth grade, looking forward to my new books and lessons and building up my defenses against peer assaults. Mom would have two or more jobs to offset our loss of income from the death of Mrs. Harm and still be gamely assuring me that our life was going to get better. If all went as planned, we could be going to college together in five more years.
Aunt Charlotte received parcels from the art store in Charleston. She asked me to slit them open with the serrated kitchen knife. I had made the mistake of pulling out the contents of an early parcel, some packs of paper labeled with oriental writing. “Ah, my Japan paper,” she had said breezily, snatching it from my hands. After that she stood guard as I opened the parcels so I couldn’t peek inside, then hopped off to her studio clasping them to her chest. She gave me the task of answering the messages on her website. “Just the ones that seem serious. When in doubt, ask me.” I was relieved to find some promising inquiries, mostly for paintings of Grief Cottage. One lady asked if the artist would be willing to paint a boy into the foreground if she were to provide photographs of her grandson.
