“I shall see if Mizz deMarionne will permit an appointment.”
The massive door closed on silent hinges.
Ella had not asked me my name. Which meant, although all these years had passed, she had recognized me in return.
Which also explained why I had not been invited inside to wait.
**
My taxi journey from the airport on this evening had taken me into the heart of old Charleston, that collection of ancient buildings on a flat peninsula barely eight feet above sea level. I’d sat in silence in the backseat of the taxi, reading the familiar street names as I traveled closer and closer to my childhood haunts. King. Tradd. Then the crossing of Broad Street, which was the invisible boundary that separated the aristocracy on the south side from all those in the rest of Charleston to the north.
The taxi driver had taken me past the familiar outlines of the mansions turned sideways to the street—in Charleston’s peculiar manner of protection from the eyes of tourists and commoners—until finally he had reached the tip of the city, at a bed-and-breakfast, where I had checked in and rid myself of my single piece of luggage.
From there, I had walked only a couple of blocks, passing an impressive array of Charleston’s storied East Battery antebellum mansions—ornamental ironwork, raised entrance, massive three-story columns, carriage house in the back, hidden gardens.
The deMarionne mansion, like the others, faced the seawall on the other side of the street, giving a daytime view of Fort Sumter smudged on the water’s horizon, where—as newcomers were told only half jokingly—Charleston’s Ashley and Cooper Rivers converged to form the Atlantic Ocean just beyond. From behind the oleanders that lined the promenade of East Battery, passersby would point at Sumter as they imagined its role at the start of the War between the States. It was at this seawall that a battery of guns had been placed to protect the city during the War of 1812; if Charleston worships anything, it is its own history, and the ensuing East Battery street name endured with pride. As did the name of the family that had owned this East Battery mansion for four generations.
The deMarionnes.
Their family history appeared in every Charleston guidebook, along with the predictable exterior and interior photos of the mansion. More than a century earlier, Jonathan deMarionne had been a blockade runner, dodging Union forces as he brought rum and gunpowder to the besieged city, trading his goods for gold and silver. His good fortune ended a week before the war itself did, when a Yankee cannonball took off his arm at the shoulder and he died instantly of shock. Since he was a difficult man, subject to drunkenness and violence, his widow found little to grieve, and in the economic chaos that followed the Confederate surrender, she took whatever solace she needed by shrewdly tripling the already massive fortune he had accumulated, avoiding the many marriage offers that followed, leaving her money to her two sons, who—in a Charleston tradition not mentioned in the guidebooks—stayed in banking and law and did little more than hoard the family fortune. Nor did the guidebooks add that this money had provided for the private schools and debutante balls for the indolent generations to come.
This I knew without a guidebook, knew without photos of the interior of the mansion that no tourist was ever invited inside to see.
For I had returned. Out of exile.
**
The door opened twenty minutes after I first knocked. It was not Helen deMarionne.
Ella frowned at me, her square black face crinkled with distaste. “Tomorrow evening,” Ella said. “Seven o’clock. Mizz deMarionne will expect you then.”
“Tonight,” I said.
“Tomorrow evening,” she said. “Gentlemen make appointments.”
She swung the door shut in my face.
Denied. Again.
I had early determined to take my triumph with full control, not as a madman. Instead of kicking futilely against a locked door, I departed from the mansion. Again.
I walked down the sidewalk toward the inn at the
southern tip of Meeting Street, where I had checked in for the duration of my stay, a stone’s throw from where I’d grown up in one of the antebellum mansions on South Battery.
As the uneven rhythm of my steps took me along the streets of my childhood and teen years, I was conscious that every good memory of Charleston was stained with darker memories of disappointment and betrayal, as if every wonderful thing I had been granted then had only been provided to taunt me with its future absence.
I did not need to look far to find disappointment.
To my right, looming over the old buildings like a dark sword stabbing at the bank of clouds that glowed above the streetlights of Charleston, was the steeple of St. Michael’s Church, mocking me, mocking my long disillusioned faith, mocking the memories of my mother. And in mocking all of that, mocking my return to search for her after all these years away.
**
I should make it clear that upon my return to Charleston,
I was a man without a sense of God, unless one counts denial as a begrudging form of relationship.
Much of that denial had to do with my mother, who
I now see was one of the few examples of real faith in my childhood.
Church puzzled me then. It was pleasant enough when all that was required of my faith was to follow the instructions of Sunday school teachers who encouraged me to use crayons to color drawings of men in fishing boats. They did not like my questions, however, and learned to ignore my waving hand.
Christmas, for example, was confusing to me. I was expected early to stop believing in the legends of a bearded Santa Claus and flying reindeer, yet I was instructed to maintain faith in flying angels who sang above the manger and in bearded wise men who followed a moving star. I found Easter equally confusing; I was told that the Sunday morning egg hunts across the lawns of Charleston mansions were the result of a mythical bunny. These gaily attended events provided surreal contrast to the blood-drenched story preached in church an hour earlier about a man who was whipped, beaten, nailed by his hands and feet to a cross, then, I was told to believe, rose from the dead.
When I was old enough to join my mother with the adults in the church service, I endured long and boring sermons among the highbrow Charlestonian women, who wore wide-brimmed hats and white gloves and pastel dresses and smiled sweetly at each other across the pews, then turned and whispered vicious gossip during the passing of the collection plate.
Where is God in this? I wondered as a child.
**
Again and again my mother answered my questions as wisely as she could, telling me repeatedly that there was a difference between faith and religion, and in so doing, gently led me to trust in a God of love invisible beyond the man-made boundaries of the church. She promised me that God’s love was forever, just as a mother’s love was forever.
Then she abandoned me.
**
If my mother’s unexplained departure was not enough to drive me from God, there were the formative years of my adulthood. I spent those years away from Charleston and the United States, yet I saw enough of the whirlpool that is American culture to scorn the little religion that managed to surface among the other flotsam. I glimpsed the television shows where slick con artists promised healing in exchange for money sent to support their ministry. Newspapers gave me details about protesters hatefully and self-righteously shouting the name of Jesus as they condemned people who didn’t share their beliefs; occasionally on AM radio I heard the arguments of those who insisted the world was only six thousand years old and fossils were planted by the devil to fool us; I heard the rantings of white supremacists and the claims of their fanatical religions.
Because of self-imposed isolation during my exile, books were my companions at all opportunities. Through the smoked glass of history accounts that let readers peer into the past, I learned the religious evils that had been hidden from me by the Sunday school teachers so determined to entertain us with crayons and paper: the popes who f
athered illegitimate children, who built the golden glories of the Vatican through the sweat and blood of terrified, indulgence-seeking peasants; the history of Crusaders who raped and pillaged and killed tens of thousands in the name of a man of love; cultural eradication doled out by harsh, unyielding missionaries who followed the slave traders to the depths of Africa.
Lastly, in defense of the stubbornness of my soul’s early flight from God, there were all the events before I left Charleston—events that seemed totally bereft of the touch of a God of love.
God, however, as I was about to discover, is a patient hunter.
I can now examine my years of exile and see earmarked on the pages of my personal history the times he beckoned, times that I resolutely turned aside to my own path. I imagine that in a way, I was like Jonah, determined to head in the opposite direction of God’s calling.
For Jonah, the city he desperately wanted to avoid was Nineveh. For me, it was Charleston.
Unlike Jonah, however, it did not take the belly of a great fish to convince me to return.
But a letter.
So it was that I had returned to the place of birth—and death—of my childhood.
My mission was simple.
I wanted to find the truth about my mother. I wanted revenge. I wanted justice. I wanted the love I had abandoned.
I certainly did not expect to find God. Or the forgiveness I desperately needed.
**
Along that street, I briefly closed my eyes against the outline of the steeple against the sky, as if the feeble barrier of the darkness behind pressed eyelids might stop the memories I had vowed to discard in the same way I had once promised never to return to this city.
Although some southerners place honor above all, I felt no remorse at breaking that promise. No, the letter that drew me home had granted me a total and unexpected absolution.
With that absolution, I intended to take my vengeance, pound by pound, no matter how closely I gouged near the hearts of those who had driven me away.
Chapter 2
“Good morning to our mystery guest. We’ve all been excited to meet you.”
I had hoped to escape the bed-and-breakfast unobserved. My hand, in fact, was on the doorknob at the main entrance of the two-story Victorian mansion. Behind me were the gleaming hardwood floors and frayed Oriental rugs and the fresh smell of lemon furniture polish, for early as I had woken, the maids had arrived before.
I prepared my face with a smile before I turned. “Good morning, ma’am.”
“It’s a beautiful day to step outside. Did you sleep well?”
My questioner was in her midforties, bobbed blonde hair perfect, spring dress perfect, trim figure perfect, her southern vowels perfect. Although she was trying to distract me with idle conversation, I saw that her curious eyes sharply surveyed me from top to bottom. I wondered how she would catalog me. I wore tan slacks and a black golf shirt. I was in my early thirties. I had not shaved in a week, and the color of my new beard matched the dark hair cropped closely on my head.
“I did sleep well,” I answered this morning’s hostess. It was a lie. In attempting to fall asleep after returning from the deMarionne mansion, my thoughts had swung back and forth from the tortures of old memories to planning my search and vengeance.
“Wonderful,” she beamed, tilting her head. “And your room?”
“Wonderful.” Which was not a lie.
I’d been given the deluxe room with a twelve-foot ceiling, a lazy ceiling fan, a four-poster bed, and an entrance to the wide second-floor balcony that overlooked Charleston’s White Point Gardens and the harbor beyond. The room had dried flower arrangements, faded wallpaper patterned with roses, an antique writing desk, early nineteenth-century sofa and chair, and a wide turret that overlooked a sprawling oak covered with Spanish moss. It was serene and comfortable and cozy, the opposite of everything I had felt since receiving the letter and enclosed plane tickets that had summoned me to Charleston from New Mexico.
“Louis Comfort Tiffany,” the hostess said, glancing back up the curved stairs that led to the room above us.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“Louis Comfort. That’s his full name.” She pointed up the stairs. “Mr. Tiffany himself installed those stained-glass windows.”
“Beautiful, ma’am.” As were the pieces of mahogany furniture, the dozens of knickknacks filling every nook and ledge, the ancient gilded frames that held dark and murky oil paintings of people long dead. I would not have been surprised if my hostess could have identified each one by name. The difference between New York and Charleston, it has been said, is that Yankees put new Oriental rugs on their floors and paintings of other people’s ancestors on their walls. In Charleston, as I could testify, our own ancestors stared down upon us, and the worn Oriental rugs had belonged to families since before the Revolution.
“Is this a vacation?” she asked. I guessed she was stalling me, hoping to see if anyone else would come from my room upstairs.
I caught her glancing at my left hand, bare of a wedding band. Checking in the night before, a different but nearly identical smiling, southern hostess had glanced at the same hand and informed me that Two Meeting Street Inn, the bed-and-breakfast I was now trying to escape, had been rated by all the premiere travel magazines as one of the South’s most romantic getaways. Given the circumstances of my arrival, I also guessed that my lack of a wedding band would lead to gossip as soon as I managed to step outside and escape.
“Yes,” I said. I maintained my polite smile, disguising my contempt for her syrupy southern gentility, which in its ostensibly innocent guise masked a unique and oblique style of probing and cutting. “A vacation.”
I refused to yield any more information.
The evening before, as I had checked in, the first hostess had been equally inquisitive. Five nights in the mansion’s premiere room had anonymously been prepaid for me, she’d commented, adding how romantic it was that someone was willing to spend so much to send for me in such a mysterious manner. Yes, I had agreed with that hostess, how romantic. She, just like this morning’s hostess, could not stand not knowing who had provided this for me.
Neither could guess how badly I wanted to know that answer for myself.
In fact, I’d checked for messages upon first rising, hoping that this mystery person would contact me. Nothing. But
I wasn’t going to wait here to find out who had sent for me. I had my own agenda, well rehearsed during my sleepless night.
“You won’t stay for breakfast? Fresh-baked cranberry muffins.” My southern hostess glanced up the stairs again.
“No, ma’am. Much as it sounds enticing, I’m afraid I shall have to refuse that pleasure.” Although I hated it, I’d learned early the southern conversation games and could play as well as anyone.
“What a shame you will be walking this beautiful city alone . . . ,” she said with a final glance up the stairs.
To a Yankee, this might have seemed like a harmless observation. I knew better. For a southerner, especially a Charlestonian steeped in the antebellum traditions, her implication was less subtle than the working end of a baseball bat.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I pushed the door open, letting sunlight flood the antiquities behind me. “It is a shame.”
Chapter 3
For the most part, I was fond of lower King Street. Not the section south of Broad, where the ancient houses lined King Street in regal indifference to passersby. But north of Broad, where I now walked.
Here, the business of King was doing business. Not in the brash American, twentieth-century style of neon signage, sprawling parking lots, and franchise locations determined by demographic statistics. In contrast to the commercial zones of the suburbs, King was elegant, European—a quiet gentleman in a discreetly custom-tailored navy suit above the fray of lesser beings who fought for status by flaunting overpriced, off-the-rack designer labels.
King had been built long before the fir
st black Model T came off assembly. Once amply wide for carriage traffic, it was now too narrow to allow much space for parking. Shoppers arrived by foot, leisurely studying the antiques and old books clustered in storefront windows, squinting in the odd pools of sunshine that gathered in stray gaps between the tightly squeezed old stone buildings, or stepping over occasional streams of water where proprietors had hosed down the sidewalk. Then stopping in narrow, elongated coffee shops where specials were written on chalkboards in pastel chalk and where waitresses knew many of the customers by name.
I kept myself on the sunny side of the street, walking at a pace that suited the charm of King, pausing often to stare into the different antique shop windows at the array of furniture, statues, and paintings, all from an era made famous by Gone With the Wind.
When I arrived at my first planned destination of the day, a bell sounded as I opened the door.
Antique shops on King tend to specialize. Jewelry. Art. Civil War prints and old magazines. Proprietors have extensive knowledge in limited areas and tend to prefer concentrating their potential for profits accordingly.
The interior of this store was crammed with furniture lined in ragged rows. Full-length mirrors hung from the walls. Chandeliers were so low they almost brushed my head as I passed beneath them. It felt more like a crammed discount warehouse than an upscale antique store. Yet I knew there were no discounts ever offered here, and the white price tags, written by hand and attached with knotted thread, would rarely show prices under four digits.
I stepped farther inside.
A fine chair caught my eye. It wasn’t ornate, but true beauty in furniture resonates, projecting an aura of timeless quality that even the uninitiated in antiques understand. The chair was probably a century old, high backed, with thin arms and thin legs of exquisitely carved mahogany. What struck me most were the legs. Each ended in the shape of talons clutching a smooth ball. I’d seen this chair before, but I could not place it in my memory.
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