I took Cousin James’s hand and held it. I loved him very much.
The clan gathered in Cousin Xenia’s room. Honoria and Clive stood near the door, beside an elderly black woman in a neat grey dress with white collar and cuffs. I moved back to stand with them, but Honoria pushed me gently forward, whispering, “Stand next to the great-aunts, Miss Stella.”
Cousin James read the office of Morning Prayer with authority and courtesy, and I was not embarrassed. I felt that even my father, who found all churches a blasphemy, all prayer a self-indulgence, would not have been offended. What Cousin James was doing was wholly real; I did not know why; I only knew that I believed and trusted him. They all sang “O God, our help in ages past,” and then we all went out to the courtyard and sat on rough wooden benches around the fountain. The trellised vines and the water cast a coolness around us, and the aunts all waved palm-leaf fans. Honoria and Clive had disappeared, and sherry was served by the old woman in the grey uniform, who was introduced to me as Saintie, from Nyssa.
“What is Cousin Xenia hearing this week?” Uncle Hoadley inquired. “As I recall, Miss Harris was having a little trouble with Racine. Her French was not up to him.”
Cousin James seemed preoccupied, so I said, “I think it was Plato, Uncle Hoadley.”
Cousin James gave me his brilliant smile. “You recognized it. Yes. Plato’s Parmenides.”
“Of course she recognized it,” Aunt Mary Desborough said. “Terry grew up with blue-stockings. He wouldn’t have married a ninny.”
“And she plays Shakespeare with us!” Aunt Olivia clapped her hands in pleasure.
“Miss Harris also reads Xenia the Tribune paper from New York,” Aunt Irene said. “Of course it’s a week late, but I don’t suppose that makes much difference.”
Aunt Mary Desborough, perhaps trying to make peace, nodded. “Xenia was always a great one to keep up with the news, but does it really make much difference if she hears what’s happening in Bishop Potter’s college in Virginia a week after it’s happened or not?”
Aunt Irene was not as generous as Aunt Des. “Bishop Potter’s a damn-yankee, and it is not his coll—”
Cousin James rode across this, bathing Aunt Irene and Aunt Des with his smile as though they were in complete agreement. “We’re sorry to hear that Olivia’s rheumatism is being trouble-some.”
Aunt Irene shook her head. “We pray that it will not make her bedridden.”
Cousin James put his hand on Aunt Olivia’s small shoulder. “I don’t think Olivia will be bedridden, Irene. Not Olivia. Excuse me, dear friends, and I will get my hat.” He disappeared into the house.
“Who’d have thought Cousin Xenia’d ever be bedridden?” Aunt Irene asked. “Of all people—and look at her, three years next month in that bed. All that reading aloud, and she doesn’t hear a word. It seems a waste.”
“It would be a waste if it were you!” Aunt Olivia cried. “James knows precisely what he is doing. And it is none of your business.” She turned to me just as Uncle Hoadley was opening his mouth, and whispered, “There are times when I simply don’t understand why Xenia doesn’t die of humiliation. Thank God she has a brother who keeps the hope that somewhere in that inert lump there is still a flame to be nourished.”
Cousin James returned, carrying his broad-brimmed white Panama hat. “Come. Let us go to Lucille’s.”
Saintie handed us our parasols and we walked out what would have been the back door at Illyria, onto a white sand road. Uncle Hoadley took my arm. “I do apologize again for my wife and the great-aunts.”
“It’s all right, Uncle Hoadley.”
“No, it’s not. And I can see that this kind of squabbling is new to you. At least in Jefferson there is more of the tribe; the animosities are diluted. And I’m sure you realize that underneath the barbs is an unbreakable loyalty. We may cavil amongst ourselves, but we present a united front to the world.” He smiled. “You are a Renier now, and you will have to get used to our Renierities.” He pressed my arm and changed the subject. “Terry’s present work is a great source of pleasure to me. We have a long tradition of public servants in our family. Not only our ambassador to France through whom Mado came into the clan.”
Theron the ambassador
Went to France before the war;
Dr. Theron, his young son,
There met Mado, loved and won,
But lost the War Between the States …
“The very first Theron Renier in Charleston was a noted Federalist, and his son, also Theron, went to the Supreme Court. Like the other Therons he was an idealist, rather than a realist. I have tried to teach Terry that it is the realists who clean up after the idealists.”
Cousin James moved up beside me, and Uncle Hoadley stepped back to walk with Aunt Irene. Cousin James looked at me from under his white eyebrows, saying, “Child, I’m glad you’re in Illyria. You’ll be safe there.”
It seemed to me that Illyria was tottering on the brink of a precipice, so I looked at him questioningly.
“The warning is oblique, my dear, but it is a warning. You are obviously far too intelligent not to realize that there is little safety left in our world today. Sometimes I listen to Miss Harris reading to Xenia, or I go to Lucille’s cottage for a quiet game of cribbage, and I wonder if the ancient Romans thought that when they had defeated Spartacus they had solved their problem. Stay in Illyria, Stella, and do whatever Honoria and Clive tell you to do. You should be safe there when the storm breaks.”
“What’s that, Cousin James?” Uncle Hoadley came abreast of us, and I understood quite clearly that Uncle Hoadley and Cousin James, under the careful veneer of courteous cordiality, disliked and distrusted one another.
“It’s going to storm,” Cousin James said.
“Not tonight, I think,” said Uncle Hoadley.
Cousin Lucille’s cottage was scarcely visible through the trees and bushes which grew around it and choked it. Spanish moss hung thickly from everything, from the wistaria vine which climbed the porch, the rain-water spout, the crape-myrtle trees which crowded together, from the oaks whose interlocking branches obscured the sky. Azalea bushes pushed untidily up to the trees, tangled with cape jessamine, turning brown and dry from the long summer.
Cousin James pushed aside branches and tendrils of the uncontrolled jungle growth as we made our way down the path. “Lucille pinches pennies to pay a yard man, but she doesn’t give him any supervision. I sometimes wonder why Lucille comes to the beach, because she never leaves the cottage. The heat, of course. If you are feeling the heat here, and I can see that you are, it’s a good thing that you were not asked to endure a summer in Jefferson. I must speak to Lucille about the yard again. It’s one thing to let wool grow over the house, as it were,” he plucked a long beard of Spanish moss from a bush, “but another to let it grow over her eyes. It is all, I suppose, part of our crumbling. Mado—your husband’s grandmother—had a lovely belief in guardian angels, assigned by the Heavenly Powers to each of us. Perhaps if we all believed in our angels we might not do all the self-centered and possessive and jealous things which hurt and separate us. Our angels haven’t been around for a long time. Mado used to say that we could make them go away, and we seem to have done just that.”
His voice was infinitely sad. I looked at him, his eyes shaded by the wide brim of his hat, his neatly groomed mustache and beard concealing the set of his mouth. He saw my glance, and I turned my eyes away, shifting my parasol in my embarrassment.
He gave me his swift, sweet smile. “Mado always said that the angels would come back. She was an extraordinary woman. Of course I loved her,” he added simply.
We climbed the splintering steps to a paint-crumbled porch supported by Doric columns, and entered a large, dark room which appeared to be the entire ground floor of Cousin Lucille’s beach cottage. It was crowded with far too much furniture, chairs, sofas, couches, love seats, tables, cases of porcelain, objets d’art and bric-a-brac, rug piled on rug on the floor, almost as though
everything in all of Illyria had been jumbled together in one room. The walls were smothered in pictures so that the ornate plum-red wallpaper hardly showed. I felt suffocated.
Wishing for one of the palm-leaf fans, I looked around the dark and cluttered museum of a room, trying to find Cousin Lucille, and finally saw a huddled, black-garbed figure in a maroon velvet wing chair. It sat blinking like a large black toad: Cousin Lucille. Her yellowed white hair was bunched on top of her head. From her long and wrinkled earlobes dangled diamond pendants. Her rings made Aunt Mary Desborough’s look insignificant. She gestured to me with fingers gnarled as parsnips. “Louder!” she shouted, though no one had said anything. Cousin James gently shoved me towards her. “Louder!”
Cousin James spoke slowly, clearly. “This is Terry’s wife.”
“Who?”
“Stella, Terry’s wife. Remember, you invited her for the midday meal.”
“Yes, of course I remember, James, I am not an idiot. Who was she?”
“Stella North.”
“I don’t speak to Northerners.”
“She is from England,” Uncle Hoadley said.
Cousin Lucille sucked long, yellowed teeth. “Nonsense, Hoadley. Northerners don’t come from England. The English were on Our Side. Don’t contradict James. Show some respect for your elders, young man. She’s pretty, isn’t she? Now who does she remind me of?”
“Mado,” Cousin James said.
Cousin Lucille shook her head, setting the diamond pendants swinging. “Too young. Too pretty.”
Cousin James gently shoved me a step farther forward. “She is more than pretty, Lucille.”
One of the claws lifted from the black dress and reached for my hand. I had wanted to give myself to Cousin Xenia; from Cousin Lucille I wanted to withdraw. I reminded myself that she, too, was Cousin James’s sister, and I managed to let her take my hand, and found myself looking past grey, wrinkled skin, past little beady eyes, being drawn in deeper, deeper, through layer after layer, to where a small light flickered feebly. “Welcome to the clan, child,” Cousin Lucille shouted at last. “No. You aren’t like Mado. You are like me.”
I could make no response to that, though I knew it was meant as the highest of compliments.
“Cousin Lucille,” Uncle Hoadley shouted, “show Stella all your lovely pictures.”
“Lights!” Cousin Lucille shouted back. “Lights!”
Aunt Olivia moved to stand close to me, whispering, “Lucille brings all her Lares and Penates with her when she comes to the beach. The pictures all belong in her house in Jefferson, and so does practically everything else here.”
An elderly butler in a frayed white jacket came in and lit the candles in a large silver candelabrum, which he held up to illuminate the pictures. In heavy gold frames, they not only took up all the wall space, some of them overlapped each other. Bundled together that way, they looked like bad copies of the masters, the kind of thing art students spend hours doing in museums.
Cousin Lucille heaved herself up out of her chair and reached for the cane which she needed to support her immense weight. She waved it towards one of the darker oil paintings. “That’s my Rembrandt,” she said, “and that’s my van Eyck. William and I lived abroad after the war; he was a great lover of art.”
Cousin Lucille brandished her cane. “That’s my Cranach, and that’s my Thomas Eakins.” The cane continued to tremble, then pointed at the portrait of a glorious golden girl. “That’s the picture Winterhalter did of me while we were in Europe.”
I looked from the portrait to the fat toad of a woman pointing at it, then closed my eyes in a reflex of pain. Had time destroyed Cousin Lucille? Or had she helped to destroy herself? Aunt Olivia was still, I suddenly realized, beautiful.
Aunt Mary Desborough raised her voice so that Cousin Lucille could hear. “Our portrait of Mado in the library is by Ingres, and the big portrait in the living room is by the younger Peale.”
“Hush, Des,” Cousin James said. “You and Olivia do not need to compete with Lucille.”
Cousin Lucille’s ears caught this. “Ha! They ought to know better than to try, but they never learn. I married William Hutlidge, for all Mary Desborough would have liked—”
“I couldn’t stand him,” Aunt Mary Desborough snapped. “He was a swine.”
Cousin Lucille smiled placidly. “But a man, Des, which is something you’ve never known.”
The old butler announced, “Dinner is served.”
I was seated next to Cousin Lucille, who would occasionally reach out to give me an exploratory poke in the ribs. Dinner was fried chicken, rice, baked squash, hot bread, home-made peach ice cream.
“So you married young Terry, hey?” Cousin Lucille shouted, dropping rice and gravy over the front of her black dress. The butler took a clean napkin and quietly wiped it off. “How did you hook him?”
“I rather thought he hooked me.”
Cousin Lucille gave a snort. “And you come from where? Who was your father?”
“I was born in Oxford, and my father was Benedict North.”
“The philosopher,” Aunt Olivia said.
“A philosopher, hey? I don’t approve. Philosophy has caused my brother James all kinds of folly.”
Uncle Hoadley spoke in his calmest manner. “Cousin James, you have undoubtedly read Benedict North’s work?”
Cousin James, stroking his neat white beard, smiled. “Not only have I read it, Hoadley, but only last winter Miss Harris read Xenia his book on guilt.”
“Guilt,” Cousin Lucille snorted. “What has Xenia to be guilty about?”
“Less than you have,” Aunt Olivia said.
“Always loyal, n’est-ce pas, chère cousine?” Cousin Lucille said. “I, at least, regret nothing.”
“We were not speaking of regret,” Olivia said.
“I have no sense of guilt, either, if that’s what you’re referring to. And William worked as hard as any of you. Nobody can say he had a lazy bone in his body.”
“Nobody’s saying it. It took energy to swing that heavy whip.”
“Auntie.” Uncle Hoadley, seated next to Aunt Olivia, put a restraining hand on hers.
“Stella might as well see us as we are.”
Cousin James spoke calmly. “Like everybody else, a mixture of good, bad, and indifferent.”
“Only fools feel guilty, brother,” Cousin Lucille overrode him, “and that’s because they do things without knowing what they’re doing and regret them afterwards.”
Aunt Olivia, irrepressible, said, “I’d hate to think that William knew everything he did.”
“And if guilt isn’t regret,” Cousin Lucille shouted, “then what is it?”
Responding more to Cousin James’s gentle smile than to Uncle Hoadley’s warning hand, Aunt Olivia spoke quietly. “To accept guilt means to accept responsibility.” She looked to Cousin James for corroboration. “It takes nobility to accept guilt. Not many of us can do it.”
Cousin James nodded, setting down his water goblet with lightly trembling fingers. “But it’s a shared guilt, dear Livvy, not just a private one. That helps. We, here at this table, all have a share in one another’s actions. Lucille, like it or not, had a share in all that went on at Nyssa. And I had a share in every slave William bought on the auction block.” Before either Cousin Lucille or Aunt Olivia could speak, he turned to the old butler. “And I would like some more of that superb chicken, please, Eben.”
Eben brought the platter of chicken. He was old, and he moved slowly. Cousin Lucille began to complain loudly about his laziness and shiftlessness and thievery, as though he were deaf. I had heard Cousin Augusta speaking in front of her servants as though they were not present; it was, as it were, an agreed-upon fiction; but she had never been unkind, or said anything they could not or should not have heard. I was embarrassed, more for Cousin James than for the old butler, who continued imperturbably about his duties, finally coming in from the kitchen with a damp cloth to clean Cousin Lucil
le’s front.
“I suppose you had Clive and Honoria with you for Morning Prayer?” Cousin Lucille asked.
Aunt Irene surprised me by saying, “It is the custom, Cousin Lucille.”
Cousin Lucille brushed Eben’s hand away. “Honoria and Clive are no doubt at Little Nyssa now, James, feasting with your Saintie?”
“They are eating together,” Cousin James said quietly.
“It’s bad enough, all the Nyssa niggers putting on airs, but Honoria pretending to be royalty is carrying things too far.”
“Honoria is royalty,” Aunt Olivia said.
“I notice you don’t have her eat at the table with you.”
“That is Honoria’s choice. We would be honored.”
“James!” Cousin Lucille shouted. “Something will have to be done about the twins.”
“Why?” Aunt Olivia demanded. “The twins are fine.”
“They’ve been coming up the beach and crabbing in front of my house.”
“Why not, Lucille?” Cousin James asked. “Undoubtedly the crabs are better up here this summer than down towards San Feliz.”
“I will not have them coming around my place and spying on me.”
Cousin James said, “I really don’t think the twins are interested in spying on anybody.”
“They were peering in my windows the other night. I won’t have it. If you don’t put a stop to it I’ll report them to the authorities and have them put away. I should have done it long ago. They’re a menace.”
“Lucille.” Cousin James spoke before Aunt Olivia could get a word in. “I will speak to the twins. I really doubt if they were looking in your windows. They are not curious.”
“Someone was peering in, and if it wasn’t the twins, who was it?”
“Your imagination?” Aunt Olivia asked.
“Nonsense. I have no imagination.”
“True enough.”
“I warn you, James, I will not be spied on. And don’t just talk to the twins. I want action. Talk is a waste of time.”
“I wasted time,” Aunt Mary Desborough said, “and now does time waste me.” She held up her hand to stop Aunt Olivia and looked expectantly at me.
The Other Side of the Sun Page 18
