“Well, it’s no substitute, but some of our galleries are really good, and there are about a million museums in Charleston proper. I should think any of them would carpet your path with palm branches, if you’d like to keep busy,” I said.
It was not the right thing to say.
“Keeping busy is really not my first priority,” she said. “Finding a new American idiom to nurture is. My family has been instrumental in that for a long time. A distant kinswoman of ours founded one of the great American museums. It’s in Boston. The Gardner. Perhaps you know it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”
I did not think that Sally Bowdon-Kirkland would be one of the ones who made a separate peace. Looking at Peter Kirkland, oblivious, as he had been all evening, to anyone but Clay, I wondered if he would notice.
A moment later Barbara Costigan suddenly jumped to her feet, clutching her napkin to her chest, and fled, knocking over her water glass. We watched, open-mouthed, as she floundered around the corner toward the ladies’ room.
“Oh, no,” Buddy said. “I’m sorry, folks. She’s…it’s been hard on her, leaving the baby. I think she’s got all kinds of hormonal things going on.…”
I looked over at Sally Bowdon-Kirkland. She was studying her newly arrived crème brûlée judiciously. She looked up at me.
“Do you think you ought to…?” I began.
She lifted her shoulders.
“We just met this evening. I’m sure she’d rather have you,” she said.
I got up and went into the ladies’ room. It seemed empty, but I could hear alternating sobbing and flushing coming from one of the stalls.
“Honey, it’s Caro Venable,” I said. “Please don’t cry. Come on out and let’s talk about it. There’s nothing so bad that we can’t fix it, I promise.…”
She sobbed steadily for a time, but gradually she stopped. There was another flush and then she came out, rubbing her eyes like a child and scrubbing at the front of her dress. It was stained almost to her chubby waist.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “They leak; almost every time it’s time to feed the baby, they leak awfully, even though she’s not here, and I…I thought I had enough Kleenex in there but I don’t.…”
I looked at her in the harsh fluorescent light and felt an actual pain in my heart. I also felt a sharp, cold pang of anger at her husband and Clay and the company. Poor, bereft, sodden, frightened little soul.
“I remember that,” I said. “It’s awful, isn’t it? But it stops. Before you know it it will have stopped, and then you’ll have your baby with you and everything will be better. This is a hard time. I know it is. Come on, let’s get your face washed and some fresh lipstick on you, and I’ll just drape my cardigan around you…like this…and nobody will ever know. We’ll say you spilled your wine.”
“She’ll know.” Barbara Costigan hiccupped. “She’ll know I was sitting there leaking like a cow and crying like a fool. You can just bet she’s never leaked anything in her life, or even cried…”
I knew that she meant Sally Bowdon-Kirkland, and did something I virtually never do. I ridiculed one corporate wife to another. I did not feel one iota of guilt about it, either.
“If she leaked anything, it would be ice water,” I said. “Come on. You won’t have to see much of her at all, once this night is over. Being friends with every woman down here is not in the company policy manual. You’ll find your own, and so will your little girl. I did.”
She managed a watery smile, and we got her fairly presentable again, swathed in my scarlet cashmere sweater, and went back to the table. Clay was holding up his hand for the check. All of a sudden I did not think I could bear the drive back to Peacock’s Island in the company of this forlorn child and her little Prussian husband. I simply could not bear it. Riding with the Bowdon-Kirklands seemed even worse.
“I think I’ll stay over at the town house,” I said casually, not meeting Clay’s eyes. “There are some things for the garden I want to pick up in the morning, and I want to bring the summer linens back with me and pack them in mothballs. Clay, you can get everybody in the Jaguar, can’t you?”
He looked at me. I knew that he thought I was going to go back to the town house and drink alone. Or perhaps stay and drink wine with Hayes Howland; I did not know which he would think more unseemly. I realized, too, that I was on my way to being quite drunk. There was a shimmery distance in the air around me, and though I did not and hardly ever do stagger, still, I was walking carefully in my unaccustomed high heels and talking very properly. Poor Clay. Twice now tonight I had broken our bargain. If we talked about it, I could have told him that I did not want to drink, did not even feel like it. I simply did not want to be with these awful, doomed children anymore. I did not want to be with anyone.
But we do not talk about it, and I did not tell him.
“Suit yourself,” he said neutrally. “Be careful of your car, though. Lot of traffic tonight.”
I knew that he realized that I was not sober. For some reason, that made me angry.
“I’ll drive her back to the town house and walk on home,” Hayes said. “The air will do me good.”
We stood on the cobbles outside Carolina’s, Hayes and I, and watched Clay drive away in the Jaguar with the two captive couples. No one spoke for a moment and then Hayes said, “You want to go back in and have a nightcap? That was pretty awful.”
“No, I really don’t. Thanks, though,” I said wearily. “I think I’ll just go on back to the house and turn in. You’re right. It was awful. I feel very bad about it. I really didn’t do much to keep things going.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Hayes said. “You tried. We both did. There wasn’t any way those two were going to let you draw them out. You were doomed before the night even started.”
“Why?” I said, surprised.
“Christ, Caro, look at them,” he said. “And look at you. One of them looks like a fat little brewer’s wife in a too-tight Sunday dress and the other one looks like Seabiscuit, and there you sit looking like…I don’t know, a Persian princess or something in that red silk, with all that black hair down your back, and you twenty years older at least than either one of them, and a million times richer…What do you think?”
“I never thought about it that way, Hayes,” I said honestly. “I really never did.”
“Well, it’s true. You’re something special, Caro. Time you knew that, if you don’t already. Clay ought to tell you.”
“Well…thank you,” I said.
The car came, and we got in and drove the short distance to the town house in silence.
“Would you give me a nightcap if I came in for a minute?” he said, not looking at me.
What is this? I thought. This is Hayes. I don’t know what this means.
“Lucy would kill me,” I said lightly, and then, “And I’m really tired. Why don’t we make it one night soon when Clay and Lucy can join us?”
“You got it,” he said affably, and saw me to the door. I shut it behind me, but then I went to the front bay window and watched as he walked away down Eliott Street toward Bedon’s Alley, where he would cut over to Church Street and home. In the light of the corner streetlight he stopped and looked back at the window, and I stepped back involuntarily, as if he could see me. But, of course, he could not.
For an instant, it was as if I had never seen him, was seeing him now for the first time. Only then did I realize that, whenever I looked at Hayes Howland, I had been seeing the young man who had been Clay’s friend when I first met him, the irrepressible roommate from the University of Virginia, broad of shoulder and flaming red of hair, freckled of snub face and irreverent of tongue, a kind of sprite, an elf, an Ariel of sorts.
But now I saw that Hayes was middle-aged. It was funny; I did not see that in Clay, nor really, even, in myself, when I looked into my mirror. But it was true of Hayes Howland. He seemed older by far than any of us, older than he should by rights be. I saw that t
he broad shoulders were a little stooped now, with the beginning of a roundness to the back, and the red hair dulled and streaked with iron gray and worn away on top so that it was almost like a monk’s tonsure. It made his pale face seem longer, and the glossy mustache he cultivated, which made him look, as Clay once said, like he was eating a chipmunk, was thinner and gingery. Even from my window I could see that the freckles on his face had run together in places, and the ones on the top of his head, so that he seemed splotched with darkness here and there. His raincoat had a rip in the lining, and part of it hung down below the hem. That meant nothing; Hayes wore wonderful clothes, but they invariably looked as though he had slept in them. But somehow tonight, the draggled hem and the bleaching lamplight and the rounded shoulders all added up to something else. Hayes looked…defeated. Seedy. I thought of Willy Loman.
I went upstairs and undressed and crawled into one of the pretty rice beds in the master bedroom. The sheets smelled a little musty but were smooth and cool. I turned off the bedside lamp and lay in the darkness, thinking about Hayes. The thought came, unbidden and as whole and complete as an egg: What does he get out of all this? What’s in it for him?
He had been with Clay now almost since college. Day by day, closer than any brother, he had cast his lot with Clay at the very beginning of the Peacock Island Plantation Company, leaving without apparent regret the job with the Charleston law firm and coming on board as Clay’s legal adviser, assistant, and general factotum. Hayes did everything. He advised, he traveled for the company, he ran errands, he oversaw personnel, he haunted building sites and construction crews, he sat in on marketing and advertising meetings, he scouted universities and graduate schools for the kind of young man or woman Clay wanted, those with the invisible but unmistakable stamp of the company upon them. Most of all he was Clay’s link to the Lowcountry. There was not an old family or a cache of old money from Litchfield to Savannah that Hayes did not know, or his family did not. Hayes brought Charleston to Clay. In turn, Clay took Hayes with him on his trajectory straight into the sun.
And yet…and yet. Somehow it did not seem that Hayes was a terribly successful man, much less a contented one. I could not have said precisely what I meant by that. It was just that Hayes had a restlessness, a kind of chronic discontent that his general affability and foolishness sometimes did not hide. He was court jester and confidant, but sometimes he was moody and bitter, too, and then Clay wisely let him alone. The moods rarely lasted more than a day, but they were real.
For one thing, I don’t think Hayes and Lucy ever had quite enough money. He had married Lucy Burton the year after Clay and I had married; they had known each other since infancy, and were out of the same tiny, dense gene pool. Lucy’s parents, like Hayes’s, were an old Lowcountry family, though, as Hayes himself said cheerfully, poor as a cracker’s pisspot. Hayes did not marry money, but he did marry Charleston, and that, from what I could see, was what always mattered to him.
But I thought now that it must have been a struggle at times for them. Hayes was officially listed as number two man in the company after Clay, but he had no financial interest in it, for all the joint venture money he sniffed out for Clay, and I knew that his salary, while better than any other in the company, even the one Clay allowed himself, was not spectacular. Clay puts most of the Plantation’s money back into the company. Hayes and Lucy must have stretched his salary very thin to maintain her family’s beautiful old Federal house on Church Street and give the parties that they did, and educate two daughters in the bargain, much less keep them in Laura Ashleys. I could not think there was much at all left over.
Once, I remembered, I asked Clay when he was going to give Hayes some sort of property of his own, a partnership or something.
“I guess when the right one comes along,” he said. “Though if you think about it, can you imagine Hayes running one of the Plantations?”
“Why not?” I said.
“Well, for one thing, it would probably mean leaving the Lowcountry, and he’d let you cut his throat before he’d do that. And then, frankly, I think he gets off on being my sidekick. Who else thinks he’s as funny as I do? Who else would let him fool around and goof off as much as I do? Hayes is a born second banana, and I think on some level he knows it. He’s never asked me to let him have a crack at anything else.”
I thought about that conversation now, as the night stilled and quieted outside my drawn curtains. Something was missing; something did not equate. Hayes was more than he seemed, had to be more.…
But the thought eddied away on the spiral of thick wine-sleep that took me under, and when I woke, only short hours later, with a cottony mouth and the beginning of a dull headache, it was gone from my mind. I sat up abruptly, as if summoned by an alarm clock, slid out of bed, splashed my face and scrubbed my teeth, ferreted out some old jeans and a sweatshirt of Clay’s from the bureau, and was in the Cherokee and on the road south within an hour.
By the time dawn broke, red as the apocalypse to the east, I was on the bridge from Peacock’s over to the island, and by the time the sun touched the tops of the live oaks that leaned over the marsh house, I was fast asleep again in the small iron bed that had been my first in the Lowcountry.
4
The five rules of sleep according to Kylie Venable:
Don’t draw the curtains. God can’t look after you if He can’t see you.
Face the door. You need to be able to see what’s coming.
Pull your knees up to your chin. It’ll get your feet first that way.
Keep your ears covered up. You won’t hear it calling you.
Never let your hands hang over the side of the bed. There’s no telling what might take hold of them.
She made those rules for herself when she was about five, after a series of screaming nightmares that dragged us out of sleep night after night, hearts hammering. We wrote them down for her and pinned them on her bulletin board. If she followed them scrupulously, she dropped right off to sleep. If she omitted one, or fell asleep before she could complete her ritual, she would have the dreams. We were never sure why it worked. A child psychologist who was visiting on the island later told us that it was the instructive power of ritual, and that Kylie had, in effect, healed herself.
“But should we just let it go?” I said. “I don’t want her getting the feeling that there’s nothing between her and danger but some kind of magic ritual she thinks up. On the other hand, I don’t want her to think she can prevent all kinds of harm just by doing the same thing.”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the shrink said. “It was about time for the nightmares, and it’s about time for them to go away. Kylie has a good sense of her own needs, I’d say.”
And she did. The nightmares faded, and she was never so afraid of anything incorporeal again. Or if she was, I never knew it. And I think I would have. But all of her life, she put herself to sleep at night by following her Five Rules of Sleep, and I often do it, too, to this day. It does help. I don’t know why, but it does.
On this morning, I lay still in the tiny room that had always been mine, that looked out through a great, twisted, moss-shawled live oak to the marsh proper and the creek, and for a moment I did not open my eyes. I knew that it must be late morning or even early afternoon, for I had the cleansed, heavy-wristed feeling that you get when you have finally had enough sleep, but there was no sense of the strong overhead sunlight that should have fallen on my lids. I opened my eyes and looked out my uncurtained window into a solid wall of white. Fog. The dawn conflagration had told it truly: red sky at morning, sailors take warning. It was odd, though. We usually get those heavy, solid, still fogs in winter and very early spring.
I rolled over and stretched luxuriously, feeling each separate vertebra pop, feeling the long muscles in my legs pull. I lay still, smelling the peculiar island smell of damp old percale and salt mud, listening. But I heard nothing; not the songs of the migratory birds who often lingered on their way far
ther south; not the busy daytime rustle of the small communal wildlife in the spartina and sweet grass; not the faraway tolling of the bell buoy off the tip of Edisto; not the low throb of engines on the inland waterway. Nothing. The fog had swallowed sound as it had sight. I knew if any noise did penetrate, it would sound queer and displaced, without resonance. Fog bounces sound about like a ventriloquist.
I knew that I would take no photographs until it lifted, and toyed with the idea of simply burrowing back into the old piled, limp pillows and going back to sleep. But I did not need sleep; I needed to be out on the island, to let it slip its green fingers into my mind and draw out the sad silliness of the night before. Watercolors. That was what this day called for. Watercolors of the intimate, ghostly body parts of the island as they emerged from the whiteness and were swallowed again: a live oak arm with its sleeve of fog-covered moss, a cypress knee, the bones of the dock, the red hull of my grandfather’s canoe, bumping against the rubber tire fender. I thought of John Marin and his watercolor Maine Islands, so much more powerful and evocative for what it hid in the fog than what it showed. Yes. A day for vignettes and glimpses.
I got up and showered in the rusted stall in the bathroom, letting the brackish, sulfur-kissed water sluice every knob and crevice of my body. I was, I thought, one of the few people on earth who liked the paper-mill stink of the island’s water. I kept big drums of spring water at the house, both for drinking and cooking and for washing my hair, as I knew Clay hated the smell of it after I washed it in island water. Like a chemistry experiment gone wrong, he said. But I liked it. Today I would be totally a creature of the island; I would smell of it and taste of it, as well as see and touch and hear it.
I put the jeans and sweatshirt back on and made coffee and found a rock-hard bagel and zapped it in the microwave, then took my breakfast to the table before the long windows that faced the creek. I ate staring into the shifting wall of the fog. After breakfast I rooted out my watercolor block and the tin box of colors, filled a plastic two-liter cola bottle with water, and started out the sliding door onto the deck. Silence and wetness smacked me in the face. I stopped and closed my eyes and breathed it deeply into my lungs.
Low Country Page 9
