Lost Island

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Those boats still look pretty much the same,” Charles said, coming to stand beside me. “Giles owns a fleet of them now, you know. Something, I’m afraid, that never pleased Marian. His mother always wanted him to be a proper lawyer like me.”

  Giles, as I well remembered, was not given to being “proper” about anything, and the business he had developed had been his inspiration from the first. He had thought of using shrimp and other seafood for some of Vinnie’s best family recipes, which were then frozen and marketed as luxury foods. The Sea Oaks brand of specialty items had been successful enough to make Giles a well-to-do man. His mother had never quite forgiven his entry into “trade,” nor had she ever stopped raising her proud Southern nose over the smell of shrimp, even though she never visited Giles’s freezing plant over in Malvern. Giles was of the new South, his mother belonged to the old.

  Charles moved toward his easy chair and gestured me to sit down. “We never see you on Hampton any more,” he said regretfully. “How are you, Lacey my dear? I must say you look more and more like your mother every day. You’re every bit as pretty, and you have that look of being alive about you that she had. But how are you, really?”

  I chose the small rocker Marian Severn had once preferred in this room. I smiled at him affectionately, sensing his fondness for me, and refrained from saying “Haunted.” Once Charles Severn had been in love with my mother, Kitty Ainsley. Theirs had been a romantic and not very happy story.

  He had been engaged to Amalie, my mother’s older sister. Then Kitty had returned to Malvern after a long absence. They had been swept away without meaning to be, and Charles had decided that it was Kitty he must marry. But my mother could not bear to hurt her sister. She went away north to Chicago and married my father a few years later. Charles, however, had not married Amalie, after all. Only a few months after my mother ran away, he had married an old friend, Marian Huntington, and his marriage had apparently been a happy one. Amalie also recovered quickly enough, for she had married Judge Gaylord Hampton, to whom she had been devoted until his death.

  I think Charles would never have been the right man for my mother, because she had a taste for strong, dominant men like my father, and she would not want a gentle man whom she could rule, as Marian had more or less ruled Charles. Nevertheless, Charles could hold a grudge and he had never forgiven Kitty for running away. Later, when we visited the island, there was an estrangement between them and my mother saw little of him, not caring to be rebuffed. He had not carried over his resentment to me, however, and I had long given him my affection. In a sense he was part of the island spell for me, and though I wanted to break it, I would not hurt him in answering his question.

  “Sometimes I’m not sure how I am,” I told him, hesitantly. “Though I know I like my work and I want to feel that I’m contented.”

  “Life takes surprising turns,” Charles said. “It has for me. Has anyone told you that I’m to be congratulated?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “After all these years Amalie and I are to be married,” he said.

  The news was a surprise indeed, and very touching. It was suitable that these two who had once loved each other should come together again when they were older and in need of warm companionship.

  I went to him and bent to kiss his cheek. “That’s marvelous! I’m happy for you both.”

  “As you know, we’ve been the best of friends over the years,” he said. “We understand each other. Always did. I’ve been lonely since I lost Marian, and I know Amalie has spent a good many lonely years at The Bitterns.”

  Besides which, Amalie’s daughter had married Charles’s son. I asked the question that came first to my mind.

  “How does Elise feel about this?”

  He hesitated. “She says all the right words. But I’m not sure she’s happy about it. Elise rather enjoys ruling Sea Oaks as Giles’s wife, and the reins are likely to be taken out of her hands somewhat when her mother comes here.” Then he added with an unusual touch of bitterness, “Perhaps that will be all to the good. Elise needs to be kept in line.”

  I wondered that Giles could not keep her in line, if that was needed, and Charles seemed to read my mind.

  “Giles is busy with his work,” he said uneasily. “I think it will be good to have Amalie here.”

  I told him again how happy I was for him, and moved toward the door. “I believe I’ll go outside for a while. I haven’t seen the island by moonlight for a long time. Then perhaps I can sleep again.”

  Charles smiled at me and returned to his book.

  The front door was unlocked—who locked doors on Hampton Island?—and I slipped outside. At once the roar of ocean surf filled the night, no longer subdued by the walls of a house. Palm leaves clashed and rattled in the wind, and the whole wild rushing sound was familiar and beautiful to my ears.

  Over the little balcony that projected above the door hung a beautiful wrought-iron lamp, lighted now, so that I could see my way clearly across the portico. The steps ran down in two spreading arms that curved to enclose a great bank of azaleas, nearly gone now with the season, and without color beneath the moon. I ran down the right-hand flight and hesitated for a moment. If I turned left I could take the short cut to The Bitterns, where someone was still awake and would welcome me. But at best the burying ground through which I would pass was a gloomy place by day, and by night it could be positively eerie. The long way around would be a pleasanter walk.

  I chose the drive of white shell leading between ancient live oaks which dripped their traditional streamers of Spanish moss. When I had gone a little distance, I turned and looked back at the house.

  As always, it had the power to move me deeply. I did not want to react to it now, though its sheer beauty was breath-catching in a way I could not help. Ever since her marriage, Elise had been at work restoring the wear of years, refurbishing with fresh white paint, spending Giles’s money lavishly to make Sea Oaks what it had once been, instead of the house of rather shabby beauty I remembered from my childhood. The Bitterns was homely, and sometimes a little ghostly, but Sea Oaks was all the most beautiful clichés of the 1830 Southern mansion rolled into one. Such houses were not typical of the islands, but belonged more commonly to mainland architecture. One was forever grateful to those who had built here for not choosing the more usual plantation house.

  Where was there anything else in architecture with the simple dignity of the Doric column? Six such columns rose in soaring beauty to support the straight symmetry of the roof. Connecting them on either side of the steps stretched white balusters, and similar balusters rimmed the suspended balcony above. “Camelot,” Elise had called it when we’d played our childish King Arthur games, and Camelot it remained to me in memory.

  I swallowed unwilling tears that had no explanation, and turned my back on the house to walk along the white shell avenue between the great live oaks. Once I reached up and touched a streamer of dry gray moss with my fingers, remembering that Floria used to call it witches’ hair, and sometimes wore strands of it beneath her Merlin’s cap for our games.

  The old sense of island mystery was upon me. I had always felt it a place of secrets, of hidden motives and unforeseen consequences. How many unforeseen consequences it had held for me! It was as if all my treasures were buried here, waiting for me. On the one hand the island seemed to protect, to enfold, while on the other it opened upon dangerous ground, as unstable beneath the foot as the marshes themselves.

  I should not have risked the exterior of Sea Oaks by moonlight. I had come meaning to sneer at all clichés, and I was succumbing to the spell instead, with no will left to resist it. Somewhere from the direction of the stables a horse whinnied, and I wondered if I might go riding tomorrow. I was certainly no devotee, but I could still ride, and perhaps if I did so I could cover more ground and see the island as it was—a tangle of lonely pine barrens and scrub palmetto—thickets for hiding snakes. Hot and sandy, and without appeal for
any grown woman in her right senses.

  The spring night was lightly cool and I walked on more quickly. There was a scent of blossoms on the air. Lilac was heady, even by moonlight. Yet the perfume was laced by another odor that I recognized with a sense of nostalgia that I tried vainly to stifle—the smell of the marshes drifting over from beyond The Bitterns. There were no marshes close to Sea Oaks, but the smell of them pervaded the island—that damp, slightly tangy odor of wet grasses and mucky earth that spread for miles along the river.

  Once you’d breathed that strange scent, you’d recognize it always, even though it was an elusive odor. When you were away altogether you could never recall it accurately. But coming home to the sea islands, every islander breathed it as a welcoming sign of home—and forgot it as he lived with the marshes from day to day.

  Suddenly the full sense of the island was about me, enveloping me, shutting me in. I had always felt this as a child. On Hampton I was closed in, safely surrounded, as though no pain or turmoil from the outer world could reach me here. The illusion was deceptive, of course, make-believe, but Hampton, with its reaching arms of water all around, had always made me feel safe and comfortably enclosed. This was the frightening spell I must escape. It must not pull me back and engulf me, now that I was here. It must cease to fill me with longing all the time I was away. For I knew very well it was not the island alone I longed for. It was Giles, who came with the island. Giles and his small son. Who was also my son.

  I walked on between the dark streamers of moss, dreaming in spite of myself, remembering old times, happy times. There was a tree … Of course! I’d almost forgotten, but I would look for it now. I would remind myself mockingly of those foolish days of childhood. I quickened my steps, glancing about me more carefully, watching for the bend in the driveway that led toward the asphalt road. There it was—the turn. And the old tree was still there—a tall red gum with its markedly imprinted bark.

  Moonlight fell dappled through the high branches and when I searched carefully, I could make out the old carving. I reached out with my fingers and traced the space where the bark had been cut away, and crude lettering carved into the trunk of the tree. I touched the top line and then moved below, KING ARTHUR, the lower letters spelled. That had been Giles, carving at Elise’s urging, amused with her because he was older and regarded her as a child. Then she had taken his knife and started on GUINEVERE. She had carved her rough “G” above the “Arthur,” even though I protested that her name belonged below the king’s. Giles did not care. It was only a game to him anyway, and after a while he took the knife from her and helped her finish the name. She did not trouble to carve “Queen” because everyone knew that Guinevere was queen, and of course her name belonged first because she was a Hampton and this was Hampton Island. Or so she pointed out.

  When they were through, I borrowed the knife and cut a crude “Lacey” into the bark, considerably below the others, with no sense of being out of place. I wanted my mark on the tree too, even though I was the youngest and did not live on the island like the others.

  So the three names had stayed over the years, still marking the tree and giving evidence of the children we once had been, offering proof that Hampton was a small kingdom unto itself. In the misty moonlight around me three children moved and had their being. And I was tied to them. The exorcism I imagined was not going to be as easy as it had seemed in New York. I should be laughing at childish games—and I was not.

  Perhaps ours was the game of chivalry the South had always played. It was particularly suited to Hampton Island, which carried on the yearly tradition of an Arthurian ball. The Camelot ball, it was called. Sometimes the ball was held at The Bitterns, sometimes at Sea Oaks, but always it was an event in the area, done with costumes and panoply. Once there had even been tournaments, with riders competing for the rings. This was no more, but the ball was colorful and enormously exciting to children as well as to adults.

  In between the real balls we had played at King Arthur, and made up our own fantasies. Elise had been Guinevere, of course. It was her born role to be queen. Giles had been a more reluctant Arthur. His interests were many and broad, and it seemed confining to be a king. Nevertheless, he had performed his destined role. Sea Oaks had been our Camelot, and Hampton Island Arthur’s kingdom. As for me, I had taken no role of importance. Mostly I served as lady-in-waiting to the queen, or messenger to Merlin—which was forever Floria Hampton’s eerie role. Elise’s older sister had always been a little eccentric, and a role in which magic played its part seemed ideal for her. Now and then I pined in a tower as the Lily Maid of Astolat, or floated down from Shalott in a row-boat barge on Malvern River. Once my boat had drifted away and Arthur himself had rescued me, kind and reassuring, casually affectionate. How I had loved Giles that day!

  But on the tree I was only Lacey, and Elise had been tolerant and amused by the inconsistency.

  We had grown up from those days. Events had swept us apart and broken up our games. My mother had died and the island was lost to me for years. Then, that summer when I was seventeen, Aunt Amalie had invited me back, and I had gone. My father was recently dead, and I had been lonely and restless. Elise was away on a visit to New Orleans, but Giles was there, and we had discovered each other.

  Apparently it had surprised him that I was no longer a tousle-headed little girl who brought him gifts of odd shells, and tagged around after him adoringly. I think I was still that adoring child, but he took me for the poised and confident young woman I pretended to be. We went everywhere together. We fell madly in love. Aunt Amalie watched a little aghast, and did not know what to do about either of us.

  We were free to make use of the island, and there were hidden beaches, deep little coves. Love-making came naturally, and for me it was a giving of myself forever. Perhaps it might have been for Giles as well, if Elise had not returned to the island and found out what had happened between us. Secretly, I suppose, she had always considered Sea Oaks her home-to-be. When she was ready she had always meant to marry Giles, and it was not in her nature to imagine that he could look elsewhere. She wanted to have her own sort of good time first, and to fill her life with attractive young men, with parties and dates, and a wild fling or two of her own that Giles, of course, would never know about. She was completely confident that he would be hers easily when the time came. I was disturbing all her calculations, and she treated me with a venom I had not seen before. She set out deliberately to ridicule and belittle my all-too-obvious love for Giles. She did not dare to make fun of me before him, but she bent herself to the task of making me believe that it was ludicrous, and a little stupid as well, to believe that Giles could be seriously interested in me. At the same time she set out to dazzle him as she had never troubled to in the past.

  Unfortunately, I played into her hands at every turn. If I had been more mature and a little less dizzily and fearfully in love, or perhaps if my mother had been there to offer sensible counsel, the outcome would have been different. But Aunt Amalie, for all her loving presence, was not my mother, and her own daughters happiness was involved. So I took the wrong road in my every act. In my fright I grew possessive toward Giles. I quarreled with him and made demands he was not ready to meet. I showed myself not at all the girl he thought me to be. When I had stirred things to the breaking point between us—with Elise cutting at me cruelly behind his back, but always sweet and appealing, always helpless and sympathetic to his face—I found that I was pregnant.

  I would not want to live again through that time of miserably young and stubborn pride. I did not tell Giles. I could not. Now that there was something to ask, I could ask nothing. I ran away, and he let me go. How could he not when I was behaving so impossibly? In fantasy I saw him following me, unwilling to give up all we had been to each other. I told myself that this was the test—if he loved me enough he would come after me. Fantasy had little relationship to real life.

  Giles had been about to go into the Navy. There had been o
nly a few weeks left for him on the island. Elise was there. Ever present. He had always known her, and a marriage between them was eminently suitable. Sometimes I tried to give myself the fake comfort that perhaps there had been a little of the rebound in what he did. Perhaps I had hurt him more than I knew—or perhaps he was only relieved to be free of my importunities, to be free of me. He married Elise, uniting Hampton Island, took her on a brief honeymoon, and then went off to sea.

  While they were away, I crept helplessly back to Aunt Amalie, who was my only family, and told her the truth. Aunt Amalie was a woman of great poise and command, who had made her peace with life. She had surmounted her own defeats and she had the courage and enterprise to mend what was broken. She spent no time blaming me, or being shocked or reproachful. She saw my predicament more clearly than I did, and she saw, daringly, a way to save the day.

  I will never forget that dark, rainy afternoon I spent with her at The Bitterns when she formulated her plan. I listened to her, troubled and uncertain.

  “What if Elise won’t accept this?” I asked.

  Aunt Amalie’s face was calm, her manner assured. “I know Elise. I know she has never told Giles that she can’t have a baby. She is afraid to tell him, because Giles wants a son. If your baby is a boy, it will be his son in truth.”

  I remember how I shivered and went to stand looking out at the rain where it beat a quilted design across the river. This was not what I wanted. I wanted a miracle I had no right to ask. I wanted, somehow, to keep Giles’s baby. My baby.

  “There should be an heir to Hampton Island,” Aunt Amalie said. “An heir to Sea Oaks. And your baby could fill the role. Whether boy or girl, Giles will be the real father. He can give the child everything—where you can give nothing.”

  “I could give love. The love of a mother,” I said.

  Aunt Amalie came to stand beside me at the rain-streaked window. The smell of the marshes was heavy that day.