by Gail Godwin
“There’s always the good old STTL the Romans put on their gravestones,” said Lachicotte. “Sit Tibi Terra Levis. It means ‘May the earth lie lightly upon thee.’ ”
“I love that! It’s perfect—especially for him.”
“Latin was the one thing I loved at my boarding schools,” Lachicotte said.
“But maybe we should just have it in English, so people around here will know what it means.”
“We can do that,” said Lachicotte.
“And you know what? I think it would be the right thing for my mom’s stone. Only maybe both the Latin and then the English underneath. My mother had a special thing about Latin.”
“You can do that, too,” said Lachicotte.
***
Aunt Charlotte was to become what she called “an intermittent recoverer.” At first she tried to limit herself to a bottle and a half a day. She did her hand exercises religiously and began to paint again, though according to her not ever with the same range of motion. The publicity surrounding the Johnny Dace remains brought her a flurry of new commissions for paintings of Grief Cottage. She worked from my photos, and from her memory of her earlier paintings. The cottage was demolished soon after the publicity died down, and Charlie Coggins quickly relieved himself of the two lots to an eager buyer. Then the new owner’s neighbors, which included Ed Bolton, advised the man to call in erosion experts before he started building. The experts found that the north tip of the island was dissolving at such a rate that any structure he built would probably be washed away by 2025.
Aunt Charlotte tired herself fulfilling the new commissions and when she was back up to three bottles a day, she let Lachicotte and me talk her into going on a month’s retreat at a very nice recovery villa in Savannah. Lachicotte moved in with me, making my breakfast, driving me to school, and leaving the toilet seat up. After that she made it through a two-year dry spell, during which she built an addition onto her cottage: a bedroom and bath and a north-facing deck where she could paint outside without people spying over her shoulder and making stupid remarks. After she had her “deck-studio,” her painting underwent a significant change. Small canvases, though not as small as four by sixes. You looked at them and thought, “Oh, she’s become an abstract impressionist.” But if you kept looking long enough you thought, “No, wait, that square of grays and lavenders is a close-up of a cloud after sunset, the way it looks when the artist has penetrated the mass and shape of its vapor. No, wait, that’s the surf at high tide, the way it looks when the artist has gone beyond the outline of the waves and is among the droplets.”
We lost a third of my trust in the crash of 2008. Aunt Charlotte continued to draw her “nice stipend,” which she deposited straight over into my college fund. “Look at it this way, Marcus. When we were in clover, I was able to draw on my old savings to build my addition, and you got four years with your expensive psychiatrist. We’re going to be okay. Whatever happens, you’ve proved yourself smart enough to walk away with a hundred scholarships, and my ‘droplet and vapor’ paintings, as you call them, aren’t doing half bad. People can live with them. I like them myself. They’re both soothing and strange, and they enlarge beautifully on aluminum prints. A lawyer in Columbia bought six of them for her office.”
Lachicotte’s sudden death in 2013 sent her back for an extended stay at the villa in Savannah. In exchange for reduced rates to cover her stay, she gave art lessons to other guests, demonstrating the therapeutic values of painting with the non-dominant hand. (“You will uncover all sorts of things about yourself,” she promised her fellow recoverers. “Your unpracticed hand will waver and wobble into places your controlling hand would never let you near.”) It turned out she hadn’t needed to barter, as Lachicotte had divided his worldly goods between “My dear niece, Althea,” and “My good friend, Charlotte Lee.”
“Just like Lash … typical, typical,” Aunt Charlotte would rage or lament on my visits to the villa—by this time, I was in pre-med at the state university. “I mean, he was old but not that old. If it weren’t for his foolish need to please everything that crossed his path, he had some vital years left in him. He had no business switching cars with that boy, just because the boy wanted to drive the Jaguar.”
The “boy,” a young man in his twenties, was supposed to follow Lachicotte to Hilton Head in his own car and take him home after they had delivered the Jaguar. “I’ll never forgive myself,” the boy anguished. “I just wanted to drive that beauty for the final stretch, and at the rest stop before the bridge, Lachicotte handed over the keys and said, ‘Remember. You’re still driving on the right side of the road, but now the steering wheel’s on your right, as well.’ And then he jams on the brakes of my car to keep from running over a dog and crashes against an abutment. I saw the whole thing through the Jaguar’s rearview mirror. I’ll never be able to look through a rearview mirror again without reliving the whole thing: that brown dog streaking across the road and Mr. Hayes’s wild, crazy turn straight into the abutment.”
“That boy reminds me of those witnesses being interviewed after a disaster,” Aunt Charlotte would say. “It’s all about the witness who saw the tragedy.” And she would then mimic a witness’s plaintive voice: “ ‘I was sitting in the outdoor café having my cappuccino and planning my sightseeing for the afternoon when suddenly this building right across the road from me explodes! It was close enough to make my table shake and little pieces of ash fall into my cappuccino…’ ”
I could hear Lachicotte as he handed over the keys: “Remem-bah, you’re still driving on the right side of the road but the steering wheel’s now on yo-ah right as well.”
In fact, I could hear Lachicotte a dozen times in a day, saying things I knew he would probably say if we were sitting next to each other in the car or walking on the beach or eating supper together. I will go on hearing him for the rest of my life. He makes fresh observations, suitable to the occasion, and my ear-memory still registers his pitch of voice, his speech rhythms, his modest-warm mode of delivery. He is one of the permanent figures of my dream life.
Coral Upchurch lived another eight months after surviving pneumonia and is buried next to Billy in Columbia. She left me the antique Provençal writing desk, which is my nicest piece of furniture. Roberta inherited the Upchurch house in Columbia, which she sold to pay for her grandson’s college. The Upchurch family beach house, compromised by Archie’s trellis hiding the old brick footing columns and Coral’s unsightly wheelchair ramp, was bequeathed by Mrs. Upchurch to the island’s Historical Society, which soon restored its vernacular integrity. The William Upchurch Community Center is rented out for special functions, the proceeds going into the Society’s coffers. To celebrate my graduation from college, Aunt Charlotte gave me a party on Coral’s smoking porch.
When I came home to Aunt Charlotte’s during college and medical school breaks, we would make our pilgrimage to where Lachicotte was buried next to his mother.
“Damn it, Lash,” Aunt Charlotte would scold his grave. “Why did you think you had to look out for everything on legs and wheels?”
Though another time she said to me: “Isn’t it strange, Marcus, that after someone dies you like to recall the very traits that used to drive you crazy.”
“I miss him a lot,” I would say.
When we visited the cemetery, Aunt Charlotte usually remained on a shady bench near Lachicotte’s grave while I walked over to the newer part of the cemetery to visit “your friend,” as she called him.
I followed new rules for these visits to Johnny Dace. I wouldn’t have dreamed of plunking myself down beside his stone and choking his eternal stillness with my living chatter. He was no longer the missing dead boy crammed into a forgotten closet. His bones were at rest, laid out flat in their anatomical order until they crumbled in their own time and became part of the island’s soil. And I was no longer the boy who needed the lifeline of a silent listener who had showed himself, on two occasions, as an entity on his own terms.
“It’s so sad,” Aunt Charlotte was to brood at a later date. This was after I had started my residency and was seeing patients, some of them the same age I had been when Aunt Charlotte met me at the airport and shook my hand and said, Well, Marcus, here we are.
“What’s so sad?” I asked.
“When we don’t realize how remarkable someone is while they’re still with us. Then after they’re gone we wish we had told them, but when they were around we didn’t know yet. Does that make any sense?”
That was when I told her about the day I had met Lachicotte. “You were still in the hospital after your accident and he was taking me to buy a bike before we picked you up. We were driving across the causeway and I was telling him about my mom and I said that Mom had planned to take the high school equivalency exam and go on to college. I said, ‘She wanted to make something of herself.’ And he was quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘I would say she had already made a great deal of herself by bringing you up so well.’ ”
“That sounds exactly like something Lachicotte would say.”
“Yes, well, it went right over me that day, but later when I thought about it, I felt such sorrow that I had never understood this when she was alive and how it would have pleased her if I had said something like, ‘Mom, you are a real warrior, I’m so proud of you.’ ”
Aunt Charlotte looked at me. “Then you do know what I’m talking about.”
FORSTERVILLE: AN EPILOGUE
The island in late May, fourteen years later, supper hour.
“Well, Marcus, here we are.”
“That was the first thing you ever said to me.”
“Was it?”
“When you met me at the airport, you said, ‘Well, Marcus, here we are,’ and shook my hand.”
“What a memory. I remember nothing, other than being scared.”
“Of what you were taking on?”
“I was scared you were thinking, ‘Oh, no! I have to live with her?’ Even now I’m not sure I’d want to know your first impression of me.”
“ ‘A thin serious lady all in white, with beaky features and a Roman centurion haircut. When you shook my hand it was such a relief not to be hysterically hugged. Your turn, now. What did you think of me?”
“Marcus, you’re the one studying to be a shrink. Don’t you know when any two people meet both are thinking, ‘What does X think of me?’ ”
“You must have had some impression. What kind of boy did you see when that airline attendant was leading me to you?”
“I’m not sure. Well, let’s see. Maybe that you weren’t as much of a little boy as I’d been expecting. I had no experience of little boys. Though I’m not sure I even thought that much. It may be something I’m adding in hindsight. I guess I was mostly worrying what you thought of me. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You haven’t. When people think they’re making something up about the past, they’re often remembering.”
The island, early next morning.
“Well, it’s time to be on my way.”
“It’s hardly daylight, Aunt Charlotte. Savannah is only a two-hour drive.”
“I know, but I get antsy before a trip. I feel neither here or there.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to take along a sandwich and a banana?”
“No, I’ve got my bottled water and a package of that boring trail mix. I want to make it inside the gates of the recovery villa without falling off the wagon.”
“Maybe I’ll replace those damaged shingles on the ocean side.”
“Marcus, the shingles can wait. You’ve been slogging nonstop as long as I’ve known you. Middle school, high school, college, medical school. Now you have ten free days before your residency starts. Why not relax and see what it feels like to do nothing at all?”
“I’m not sure I could handle it. You sure you have all the materials you need for your painting classes at the villa?”
“You loaded them into the car yourself. Now let’s exchange a hysterical hug and I’ll hit the road. A person my age drives better earlier in the day.”
She stuck her hand out of the driver’s window, fluttering her fingers in a playful farewell as she turned left onto Seashore Drive. I stood at the curb, watching her little silver car out of sight. When her vintage Mercedes gave up the ghost after Lachicotte’s death, she went out and purchased a new Japanese compact along with an additional 75,000-mile warranty that included pickup when it needed service or misbehaved and a rental car delivered to your door. (“This ought to see me through to the end. I never go anywhere except for shopping and my periodical recovery jaunts to Savannah. Lachicotte couldn’t stand new cars, but he doesn’t have to know.”)
I feel neither here or there, she said as her excuse for leaving so early. After she was gone, I kept rerunning that fluttery farewell out her window. It reminded me of the dismissive finger-wave from her stretcher as the medics were carrying her out the door. (“Be a good boy, and be sure to lock up front and back.”)
“You can tell when a person has already left you behind,” explained a young patient I had been treating under supervision. “Even if that person is right in front of you, you know they’re only pretending to be with you and that makes it worse.” At fifteen, she had attempted suicide three times.
“Why not relax and see what it feels like to do nothing at all?” Aunt Charlotte had suggested. Still rooted to the curb, I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown.
I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts—farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances—like the silent ambulance with the revolving red light turning into our street and taking away Coral Upchurch. And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn’t protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.
I followed my feet back to the cottage. What they wanted next, it seemed, was to perform a house check. Kitchen in order, bathroom left neat; Aunt Charlotte must have wiped the sink and floor dry with her used towels and dropped them in the laundry basket.
My room was so full of my boyhood self that I felt the urge to report back to him and keep him apprised of our progress. (“Well, medical school is over, now comes four years of residency in a new place, and after that, if we prove ourselves worthy, a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. That gets us into our thirties, but thanks to your skipping that grade back in the bleak Jewel era, we’re still a year ahead of ourselves.”)
My aunt had left the door to her studio open. It was arranged and tidied as if expecting an imminent tour: “The Painter’s Empty Studio.” The big easel had been wheeled away from the center, the trestle tables with their tubes of pigment and containers full of brushes moved flush against the walls. (Lachicotte’s Coronation tea caddy was still home to the precious sables.) Pinned along the top of the wall-high cork board were Aunt Charlotte’s blown-up photos of tidal pools recorded on low-tide evenings over the period of a month. Below were her pastel sketches on Japan paper of the shapes and colors left in the sand. (“I want to see how far I can get toward pure design while still remaining faithful to what nature left behind.”)
In the “new wing,” as we still called it twelve years after it was built, she had made her bed. I had been half-hoping she hadn’t, so I could justify running a small load of laundry, just the sheets and towels.
(“Marcus, the sheets and towels can wait.”)
My feet having completed their house check, I was at liberty to go back to bed and start catching up on four years of lost
sleep as a medical student, or to walk down to the beach, which, sad to say, no longer offered the unrestricted pleasures of my boyhood.
Our beach had not held up as well as Aunt Charlotte’s cottage. Nevertheless, the ocean remained its old self, calming you with its predictable rhythms, taking its ancient watery breaths as it did millions of years ago when the little loggerhead hatchlings made their mad dash for its deep waters.
“The ocean is going to be just fine and the beaches are going to be just fine,” explained an unwelcome scientist at a contentious meeting when the island residents were at their most divided. “They will go on together perfectly well. There will always be beaches, but the ocean will move the beaches to new locations. The only losers will be the property owners fighting a hopeless battle to make nature stand still.” He was booed down and the twenty-three timber groins went up, jutting out perpendicular to the shoreline from the north to the south end of the island. Gone was the wide swath of unencumbered beach as far as you could see, where walkers could walk without going around the regularly spaced four-foot-high beams. Except at very low tide, bicycle tires sank in the sand. Eleven-year-old Marcus would have had to rely on Seashore Road for his daily visits to the ghost-boy.
I sat down on “our” groin, placed a few feet beyond Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk steps in approximately the same place the Turtle Patrol had relocated the loggerhead eggs the first summer I was here.
The tide had started to go out, but the waves still covered most of the beach. Aunt Charlotte had left so early that there was a good hour left for unleashed dogs to chase one another into the surf, get good and wet, then streak up to shake water and sand on their owners hugging the dry space up by the dunes. Dogs on the beach brought back Barrett, the service dog I had met on the same morning I had seen the ghost-boy poised to leap out from the doorway. Barrett would be an old dog now, his wounded warrior preparing sorrowfully for the loss of him. The warrior himself, approaching middle age, had years more to live with his handicap and his war memories. Would he be given a new dog? Or maybe both Barrett and his warrior were already dead.
