Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “That will be fine,” the woman said, and then, putting her slim hand out, “I’m Sophia Bridges. I’ll be doing research and development for the new property eventually, but right now I suppose there’ll be indoctrination and that sort of thing. It’s kind of you to bring these things for us, Mrs. Venable, but I mustn’t keep you. I’ve got Mark down for a nap, so I’m going to use the time to get unpacked before we leave for dinner. What time could your housekeeper be here?”

  Her hand was chilly in mine, and firm, but it did not linger. The slim fingers disengaged hurriedly.

  “Please call me Caro; everyone does,” I said. “I hope I’ll be seeing a lot more of you, and of course I want to meet Mark. Estelle can be here around five, I should think. We’ll probably leave for Charleston about a quarter of six. It takes an hour or so to drive it. We’ll be taking two cars over, so I’ll pick you up, or perhaps Clay will. Somebody, at any rate. You needn’t change, what you have on is lovely.…”

  But I was talking to her slender back as she turned and went back down the hall toward the bedroom, where her son presumably slept a cool and orderly sleep.

  “You’re welcome,” I said under my breath to her back, and only then wondered if there was a Mr. Bridges, and if so, where he might be.

  There probably never was one, I thought nastily. He’s probably a test tube somewhere in a fertility lab. I can’t imagine any living man getting close to her long enough to accomplish conception.

  I picked up my keys and started out of the kitchen, then stopped as I heard her voice behind me. I looked back. She stood in the door, poised like a royal coursing hound, perhaps a saluki.

  “Your housekeeper…is she African American?” she said.

  “Why…yes. She is,” I said in surprise.

  “Then I’m sorry, but I think I’ll stay here with Mark this evening. He’s never had a woman of color for a baby-sitter. I don’t want him to get the idea that African-American women are subservient or take servants’ roles. He’s never seen that. I realize that may be a little problem down here, but Mr. Howland…Hayes…thought we could get around it. I’m going to want white sitters for Mark.”

  I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Then want shall be your master, I thought, but aloud I said only, “Well, it could be a problem. So many of the black women on the island, or within commuting distance over on Edisto or St. Helena’s aren’t trained for much else, and the baby-sitting and housekeeping jobs they have are very important to them. They do them wonderfully well, and they know how much we appreciate and depend on them. We’ll see what we can do, of course, but African-American women in white homes is simply a fact of Lowcountry life. I think your son is going to see a lot of it no matter who sits for him. Maybe when you see the reality of it you’ll feel differently. These are warm, wonderful, skilled women; they are more partners than servants.…”

  “I have made my own reality for Mark,” she said without smiling. “It has cost me a great deal to keep it intact. Thank you, though. I’m sure the company’s human resources people will get to work on it for me.”

  And she turned and went back down the hall with the stride of a big cat. All she lacked, I thought, was a great, switching tail. Obviously Ol’ Massa’s wife wasn’t required to deal out her largesse here. Ol’ Missus slunk back to her car and jerked it into gear and screeched back off across the island.

  When Hayes Howland and I had decanted our two passengers and gone back outside to wait for Clay, he said, “I presume you’ve met Mrs. Bridges and the crown prince?”

  “I have indeed,” I said. “They’ve gone into voluntary exile until a pale enough courtier for the prince can be found.”

  “Uh-oh,” Hayes said, grinning his gaptoothed grin. “I’m afraid I dropped the ball, too. I could only think of that Filipino waiter at the Island Club, and that didn’t suit, either. Maybe an American Indian? I hear the new teller at Palmetto State is half-Seminole. Maybe she’s got a sister.”

  I have never really managed to like Hayes as much as I thought I would when I first met him, or as much as Clay wishes I did, but he can be bitingly funny. Tonight we burst into laughter, and could only stop when Clay pulled up in the Jaguar with the second of the two new couples in tow and raised his eyebrows at us and said, “Want to share the joke? We could use a laugh; the drawbridge was up for twenty-five minutes and I never could see why.”

  “Nothing worth repeating,” I said, and took his arm, and we went inside, the seven of us, to begin the interminable business of assimilating four disparate strangers into the Plantation family.

  We had stopped first for drinks at the town house Clay keeps in Charleston. Hayes had had his family’s cook go over and open and air it, and set out the cocktail and appetizer things. Mattie sometimes does that for us when I cannot get over ahead of time, and often stays to serve drinks and pass around almonds and benné seed biscuits. Clay likes that. Mattie has a sure, unobtrusive dignity I cannot muster. Many guests think she is our employee, and neither Clay nor Hayes disabuses them.

  The town house is on Eliott Street, a short, shady cobbled alley off Bay Street lined with dollhouse Charleston single houses. Clay bought the house years ago, when it became obvious that Plantation business was going to keep him in Charleston a great deal of the time. I know that even if it hadn’t, he would have found an excuse to own a Charleston house. He has never stopped loving Charleston, as much, I think, for what it will not give him as for what it will. Clay has made a great deal of money, but there is a small core of old Charleston that does not care about that and will not admit him into its inmost bosom no matter what civic endeavor he underwrites. He will never, for instance, belong to the St. Cecelia Society, for the simple reason that membership is inherited, and he has come to ridicule it, but he never gave up on the notion that Kylie might come out there.

  “You could cultivate Charleston,” he said. “You’ve probably still got kin around here you don’t know you have.”

  “You remind me of Groucho Marx when he said he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member,” I said once. “You scorn it, but you want your daughter to make her damned debut there. What kind of message do you think that gives Kylie?”

  “That there are some things worth having that aren’t easy to get,” he said. “That real quality is rare.”

  “And that exclusion by policy is the Amurrican way,” I said. “I’m no more going to ‘cultivate’ Charleston than I’m going to let her go to St. Margaret’s. She doesn’t live over there, Clay. I’m not going to have her in a car for two hours every day of her life just so she can go to a silly dance. Country Day is as good a school as there is in the Lowcountry. You’ve seen to that. What’s it going to say to these newcomers you hire if your child goes to school in Charleston while theirs are expected to go on the island?”

  “That rank hath its privileges,” he said, but he did not push it, and of course, as it turned out, it did not come up.

  But Clay still loves Charleston with the single-minded passion of a man for a lost first love, and when Hayes found out that the little house was being put up for sale by the old couple who were moving to the carriage house of a child’s home, he called Clay immediately. This was just before the first of the wealthy Northerners discovered Charleston and began buying up historic properties at prices the natives could not afford; Hayes, though never much of a lawyer in many respects, has the native’s nose for real estate and knew that such properties would soon triple and quadruple in value. It was still early days in the Plantation, but Clay got the money together and bought the house sight unseen, as much for its street address as for its attractiveness or livability. It lies in the heart of the hallowed area “South of Broad,” which in Charleston means more than the words might imply, and fortunately it is a prettily proportioned house that had been well cared for, needing only cosmetic attention. I have to admit that I am charmed by the little house and its walled garden, too, though I do not spend
much time there. It never seems quite real to me, never seems to be our house at all, and when Clay refers to it as our pied-à-terre, as he often does, I can only look at him.

  Charleston is as lovely in this soft, misted pre-Christmas dusk as it ever is, with gas carriage lights lit in the old district and warm lamplight shining from the shuttered windows of the old pastel houses and fingers of mist curling off the harbor up through the live oaks on the Battery and down the little side streets South of Broad. We walked the short distance over the glistening cobbles to Carolina’s down on the waterfront. The streets were full of people walking slowly, looking into shop windows, laughing, talking. There are never many cars on the streets at night in the old district, though parking is at a premium, and walking is a good way to get your initial feeling for the city. I watched the two young couples as we walked. The men were so absorbed in Clay and his words that they might have been walking in downtown Scranton. They would have, after tonight, no feeling for Charleston at all. They followed him like ducklings, having imprinted upon him instantly and totally.

  I have seen this before many times with the young who come to work at the Peacock Island Company. Just out of the pure ether of their Ivy League business or liberal arts schools, heads pounding with abstractions, newly adrift in a world so alien to the one they have just left that it might be in another geological epoch, they find Clay to be hyper-real, the Word made flesh, the only solidarity in a great mist of strangeness. He plies them like a Pied Piper. Nobody does it better than Clay.

  Almost everyone does it better than me. The young women who clicked along on their sensible heels beside me in the soft, wet night, stumbling every now and then on a cobblestone, knew very well they were sacrificial lambs in an alien land, knew that they were here almost on sufferance, to be petted and cajoled while their husbands were courted; knew that sooner rather than later they would be on their own in this wilderness, while their men received the keys to the kingdom. They had a keen, if terrible, sense of Charleston; I thought they might never alter it. I felt an unwilling stab of sympathy. I suppose all the new company wives go through something like this unwanted epiphany, but some seem to relish it, and others at least to try to put a gallant face on it. These two did neither. Sally Bowdon-Kirkland looked straight ahead, neither smiling nor responding to anything Hayes or I said, simply gone away behind her long, narrow New England features.

  Barbara Costigan cried.

  When we picked up her and her husband, Buddy, at the guest house, her blue eyes were swollen almost shut and her little porcine nose was pink and raw. Allergies, she said; something in the air down here that they didn’t have at home in Old Greenwich. But I know the stigmata of tears when I see them. Later, on the way to Charleston, I would hear an occasional rattling sniff from the backseat, where the young Costigans sat, and a murmur of concern from the stolid Buddy. In the restaurant Barbara’s slitted eyes leaked almost continually.

  “Wow,” she said over and over. “I hope you’ve got some good allergists down here.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Some of them, I think, from Connecticut.”

  She and Buddy were a pair: both square and short and tanklike, though I rather thought that Barbara’s flesh was newly acquired. Her short-skirted silk dress fit her like the casing of a sausage and was obviously a size or two too small. It was also a delicate shell pink, which might have suited her fair skin and flaxen hair if the former had not been splotched vermilion and the latter sprayed into a helmet against our all pervasive humidity. Buddy was blond, too, but a lighter shade, near-white. His skin was red. His smallish features sat in the middle of a large face as if someone had drawn them on a balloon, and radiated self-confidence and benignity. I’d have thought him the archetype of the young German burgher but for the last name. Clay had said that his IQ was off the charts. They looked, all told, like a little couple on the top of a wedding cake. I winced, thinking of the twin sunburns they would sport from April to October.

  The Bowdon-Kirklands were of a piece, too, though I thought that it was a spiritual twinship instead of a physical one. She was tall and very thin, almost six feet in her Ferragamos, and he was perhaps a half-inch shorter, and wiry. Tennis, I thought, for her and golf for him. It was obvious both of them were sports people. Their smooth tans spoke of good private grass courts and deepwater sailing and golf somewhere like the Maidstone Club, where both had been members since birth. Both were lank-haired, long-featured, and awesomely collected. Both were polite. Both were as distant as Uranus. He spoke pleasantly in a New England honk but seldom to me. She spoke hardly at all. There was no sign of tears in her slightly protuberant gray eyes. I imagined that she probably wept only when her favorite hunter had to be put down, and then a good grade of English toilet water, the kind with a number instead of a name.

  Peter Kirkland had been first in his class at Wharton. Sally, I remembered, had done something at a museum in Boston.

  I tried at first.

  “Do you have children?” I asked the young Costigans on the way over.

  A great sniff from Barbara, a hearty “Yes, we do, a daughter,” from Buddy, followed by more whispering and sniffling. I wondered what was wrong there. Postpartum depression, perhaps? A child somehow flawed?

  “She’s only a month old,” Buddy said. “Our parents thought it would be better if she stayed behind with her granny and a nurse until we know where we’ll be living. She’s a little beauty; her name is Elizabeth Sloan, but she’s already Sissy, just like her mama was. We miss her a lot, don’t we, Barbs?”

  A sob, disguised as a little cough.

  No wonder, I thought. Dragging that poor child all the way down here and leaving her new baby behind. What could he have been thinking of?

  Turning around, I said, “Well, there are wonderful things for children to do in the Plantation. The children’s program is famous, and of course the weather is almost always nice, and the beach is perfect for small children almost all year round. Sissy will love it. Summer is paradise for kids.”

  “We’ll be spending our summers on Fire Island,” Barbara Costigan said in her little-girl whisper. “My parents have had a house in Point o’ Woods forever. We always go there. I went there every summer of my life. I met Buddy there. The house was my grandparents’.”

  “Now, Barbs,” Buddy said heartily. “I bring you down to one of the most famous beach resorts in the world and you go on about Fire Island. Just wait till you see the beach in the Plantation; you’ll change your mind in a minute.”

  Barbara was silent. There would be, I knew, no mind-changing there, about beaches or anything else. I could almost see the fine, tensile steel filaments that bound her to her family back up North.

  Still, she tried, too.

  “Do you have children, Mrs. Venable?” she asked politely.

  “My son is twenty-two,” I said. “He’s in graduate school.”

  It is what I always say, when I am asked.

  “Well, that’s nice. I always thought boys must be so much easier to raise,” Barbara said, in the tone of one who thought no such thing. “You’re lucky you never had to put up with the wiles and the flirtiness of a little girl. Even one as little as mine—ours. They’re just shameless. Sissy has Buddy wrapped around her little finger, and my father—”

  She made a small noise and fell silent, and I knew that Buddy had heard about Kylie and pinched or poked her.

  Another sob. I sighed.

  “She’ll have a lot of company,” I said cheerfully. “There are several new babies in the staff family this year, and it seems to me that most of them are girls.”

  “That’s nice, isn’t it, Barbs?” Buddy said. She did not reply. I felt real joy when we saw in the distance the spires of the bridge over the river into Charleston.

  Toward the end of the evening, when neither young woman had spoken for long minutes and I was considering asking Hayes to order another bottle of Merlot, he suddenly roused himself from the contemplation of his wineg
lass and said, “You’ll have to go and see Caro’s paintings sometime, Sally, you being in the art game yourself. She’s really good. She shows all over the place: Charleston, the island, you name it.”

  Sally Bowdon-Kirkland turned her fine mare’s face to me.

  “You paint?” she said, as if she thought I might perhaps have an example of my work with me, and she would be required to examine it.

  “A little. Nothing special. It was my major at school. Tell me about your museum work; I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you a docent?”

  “Actually, I own the museum,” she said, smiling a little for the first time and revealing long teeth. I felt as if I should offer her a sugar cube.

  “Well, goodness…”

  “It’s a very small museum, really. We show mainly American minimalists who worked after 1980. I’m hoping to make it one of the tops in its field, though; and I’m having some luck with acquisitions. Or rather…I did have. I turned it over to my cousin when we…knew we were coming here.”

  I thought, not for the first time, how hard the life of a Plantation corporate wife is. They are not permitted by policy to work for the company, and the families are required by policy to live where the husbands work. That limits career opportunities to primarily resort areas. There is not a real estate position left in the Lowcountry, I don’t think. Commuting to Charleston is almost out of the question, in drive time. Some of the young marriages do not survive it; some wives with esoteric degrees and formidable skills find that, after all, they cannot live in such air. Those who do not leave adjust, I suppose, make their separate peaces, but it seems to me that there is a good bit of drinking around the club pool in the afternoons. I know that human resources is kept busy with references for counselors, of one sort or another. There is a list of them posted in the corporate office, alongside the baby-sitters.