Folly Beach

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Morning, ladies. How’re we doing?”

  “Okay, I guess. Did Aunt Daisy wake up at all?”

  “Oh, Lord! She’s gonna throw a conniption fit if she wakes up and finds out she’s got a tube down her throat. Y’all? Mark my word! She’ll rip that thing right out.”

  “Ella! Stop fretting so! The doctor said she’d sleep.”

  “Yes, don’t worry. She’s sleeping like an angel. A nurse came in to check her vitals and I told her what you just said, because that was the first thing I thought about, too. Anyway, she said they would probably remove it before Miss Daisy even wakes up.”

  “That would be a blessing,” I said. “John, I can’t thank you enough for all you did to help us. You were the guy on the white horse, saving the day.”

  “No big deal. I just did what I thought should be done, because I couldn’t think of what else to do.”

  The logic of his words sounded so funny that we actually started to laugh a little.

  “Maybe I need coffee,” he said.

  “You sit,” I said. “Let me get it for you. What time’s your first class?”

  “Not until ten,” he said.

  I was going to bring him pancakes. And bacon. And sausage. And juice. And maybe just one biscuit for me.

  “Ella? You want a scrambled egg sandwich or I can get you something else?”

  “I couldn’t eat a thing, honey, but thanks.”

  While John was eating his gargantuan breakfast, and I was picking on my biscuit, Ella went to search for a copy of the New York Times, saying that Daisy would be furious if she missed her crossword puzzle.

  “This is delicious,” he said. “Are you sure y’all don’t want to share this?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, “I’m not that hungry, for some weird reason.”

  “Okay. Oh, since we all came here in one car I thought I would run y’all back out to Folly so you can get your car. How’s that?”

  “That would be great,” I said, yawning. “Gosh, I need more coffee. All of a sudden I’m so tired I can hardly hold my eyes open.”

  “Big surprise! When’s the last time you stayed up all night?”

  “Prom?”

  “Well, when I take you home you should try to close your eyes for a few hours.”

  “What? I can’t do that, John. What if something happens?”

  “Just leave your number with the nurses’ station and they’ll call you but the doctor seemed to think Miss Daisy was pretty stable, didn’t he?”

  “I think so. As long as she stays sedated, I guess. I’ll ask them to put my number on Aunt Daisy’s chart. I’m actually next of kin.”

  Ella returned and we decided to leave. It was seven then and time to go home, take a bath, and try to nap. But before I did all of that I knew I had to call Patti and my children and tell them what was going on. So they cleared our table while I ran back up to the ICU to leave my number and then we went outside trying to remember where we had parked the car the night before. The drive was quiet on the ride back to the beach.

  First, John dropped off Ella and walked her inside just to be sure everything was safe. Then he came back outside to me.

  “Do you know how beautiful you are; even when you’ve been up all night?”

  “You know, Professor Risley, this is more than a crush.”

  “Yes, Miss Cate. I’m aware.”

  I let myself out of the car at the Porgy House and thought two things at once. One, every bone in my body was as stiff as a board and two, here I was, at my age and with probable arthritis in every joint I had and I was falling in love like a young woman. It made me so nervous to admit that to myself but I wouldn’t have to tell anyone else until I was ready. This was the beauty of middle age. You knew instinctively when to keep your mouth shut.

  I went inside and called Patti.

  “Hey!” she said. “What are you doing up so early?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said and told her the whole story.

  Patti was very upset. She made me stop and repeat what I had said several times to be sure she understood the facts. Her voice kept cracking and I thought she would start crying but she held herself together.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Patti felt the same way that I did about Aunt Daisy.

  “I sure hope so. I mean, the doctor seems to think she’ll be fine but she’s got a breathing tube, a heart monitor, an IV, and she’s heavily sedated. So to look at her, well, it’s a pretty frightening sight to see, lemme tell you.”

  “You know what? I’m coming down tonight. I’ll call you back with my flights.”

  “Okay.”

  “Jeez, Cate, you gotta ask yourself what would you have done if John wasn’t there?”

  “I don’t know. You’re right. I mean, she could’ve fallen on the bathroom floor and broken her hip.”

  “I’ll bet she was pissed that y’all saw her naked.”

  “Listen, she didn’t even look that bad, thank God, and she probably won’t remember anyway. She’s a pretty sick woman right now.”

  “You’re in love with this John fellow, aren’t you?”

  “Head over heels.”

  So much for playing my cards close to my chest.

  Next, I called Russ’s cell phone and left a message. Then, realizing he was already in school, I texted him, too. Aunt Daisy’s in the ICU @ MUSC. Call me. He called me back right away.

  “Mom! What happened?”

  “Remember the night y’all came over to tell Aunt Daisy the big news? Well, later on she started feeling bad and Ella said . . .”

  I brought him up to date and he was just as surprised as I was to hear that she had tetanus.

  “Man! Of all the crazy things to catch. I’m getting a shot this week. Can we go see her?”

  “Of course! I’m going back later on this afternoon to take Ella. Ella wants to hold a vigil and I’m not going to let her try to do that all by herself or she’ll be in the hospital next for exhaustion.”

  “No! Of course not. Oh, man, wait till Alice hears this. Did you call Sara?”

  “Well, it’s five thirty in the morning in Los Angeles. I should probably wait awhile. But look, I don’t think there’s a reason to panic. I really do believe that Aunt Daisy is going to recover and be fine. It just might take a while, that’s all. Oh, and Aunt Patti is coming in tonight.”

  “What? Mom? Is Aunt Daisy in worse shape than you’re telling me? Is that why Aunt Patti is coming?”

  “What? Oh, no! She was coming down anyway. She simply moved her trip up. Honest.”

  “Well, good then, good! It will be great to see her. She’s the best.”

  “And she can split the vigil duty with us, too.”

  “Well, I gotta get back to my class . . .”

  We hung up and I went upstairs to lie down on the bed. I fell into a deep sleep with no dreams until almost noon. When I began to awaken, it was a slow return to reality. I drifted back and forth between waking and sleeping for a while and suddenly I was dreaming about George Gershwin. He was downstairs playing my piano. It was some time in between night and day. (Oh, wait! That’s Cole Porter. A little music joke. Sorry.) Okay, so in this dream it was a summer night. The doors and windows were all open and there was a gorgeous breeze. Dorothy and DuBose were there and so was Josephine Pinckney with her dog, a black spaniel named Peter, which is a stupid name for a dog, I remember thinking. The three of them were singing along with Gershwin, first “Summertime” and then “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” They were so happy and in the next scene Gershwin was holding his head, as though he was in blinding pain. Then I remembered he died from a brain tumor and I woke up.

  I finally got up to wash my face and still couldn’t get Gershwin out of my mind. He wasn’t even forty years old when he died. Thirty-eight, in fact. What a loss to the world. If he had lived until his eighties, how many more wonderful songs of his would we have had the thrill to enjoy? That saying, only the good die young, was
too terrible. Certainly there had been so many musicians who died young and it made me wonder for a moment if the gift of musical composition came with a price. I mean, just like certain people walked into a room and saw things geometrically, because they had a mathematical bent, and others walked in the room and saw color combinations, because they were artistically creative in another way, did the gift of being able to compose extraordinary music cause an extraordinary strain on the body? Chopin, Bizet, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann—all of them gone at young ages. And in our time there was Kurt Weill, not to mention all the others whose personal excesses and dark forces got the better of them. Well, I thought then, what if the spirit of George Gershwin wants to take up residence in this house and play my piano? It was all right with me. I was happy to have him.

  I changed my clothes and had a bowl of cereal and decided that although Sara worked until late into the night, she would surely be up by eleven, her time. I was wrong. It was a groggy voice that answered her phone.

  “Mom? Everythin’s ’kay? Oh man, what time is it?”

  “Oh, sweetheart! I’m sorry to wake you. Do you want to call me back later?”

  “No, it’s fine. What’s going on?”

  “Well, it’s Aunt Daisy . . .”

  I told her the whole story and she became very upset as I knew she would, because Sara is probably, no definitely the most sensitive one in the family.

  “Do you want me to come home? Or should I come? I mean, it’s no big deal. So they’ll fire me. I’m just a bartender, for heaven’s sake. I can get another job tomorrow.”

  She had gone from the lofty designation of mixologist to the normal term of bartender, which told me she was becoming disenchanted with her work. I would talk to her about that another time.

  “No, I don’t want you to give up your job. And you know, it’s not so great out there. You might not get another job so fast. Besides, Aunt Daisy is not in a life-threatening situation. If she was, I would tell you.”

  “I just hate being so far away. Something like this happens and I can’t see for myself what’s really going on. I just hate it.”

  “Well, precious, you’ll just have to trust your mother. Or if you want, call Russ and ask him his opinion. He and Alice are heading over to MUSC after work this evening.”

  “How’s she doing? Alice, I mean.”

  “She seems fine. A little fatigued but that’s normal.”

  “I still can’t believe Alice is pregnant. It’s so weird.”

  “In some ways, yes. But you know, life goes on, doesn’t it?”

  There was a silence then and I knew what she was thinking.

  “I miss Dad,” she said. “I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I know. It seems like it all happened in a bad dream, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess you don’t miss him too much, huh?”

  “Sara? I think the facts and details surrounding his death might be a little larger and more profound for me than for you or Russ. But you should never doubt the fact that he loved you and your brother very much.”

  “And you don’t think he loved you, do you?”

  “Oh, I think there was a time when he absolutely did. But I think he had too much terrible anxiety over the last years of his life and that anxiety trumped whatever feelings of affection he might have ever had for me. I don’t think he did the things he did to deliberately hurt me. But any outside observer would say that he was absolutely his first priority. He had ceased to be a partner in our relationship years ago. And I can tell you this about his love for me—it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m okay with it.”

  “Humph. You’re in love with that John guy, aren’t you? I can’t believe you about anything. You’re rationalizing having an affair with this guy for some reason . . .”

  “Wait just a minute, young lady. You don’t dare speak to me this way.”

  “Oh! I get it now! The reason you don’t want me to come is because you’re having this affair and you don’t want me to see, isn’t that it? Dad’s been dead for maybe ten minutes and you’re already involved with somebody else? Nice work, Mom.”

  “Look, Sara, I know you were never a morning person but this conversation is out of control. When you want to apologize for being so disrespectful and when you think you can have a reasonable discussion about your aunt Daisy’s condition, call me back. In the meantime, I’m hanging up.”

  And with that, I pressed the end button.

  And I felt terrible. I hated it when Sara and I had words. And I didn’t know exactly why she thought it was all right to let whatever was rolling across her brain roll across her tongue and out into the air. She was her father’s daughter if ever there was one. Like Addison, she had always had a problem with her mouth. Since she was a little girl, I would tell her that you just can’t go around saying whatever you want to people without consequences. It had cost her many friendships and boyfriends and she never seemed to care too much. Their perceived transgressions only made her furious. In Sara’s mind, she always thought she was right and she had to have the last word. It was more important to her to vent and to walk away, think things through and come back another day, making a different case for her point of view. She did not like to be on the receiving end of any kind of guidance from anyone. Ever. They say you can raise one hundred boys for the energy it takes to raise one girl and I think truer words were never spoken. I loved my ballistic girl more than anyone in this world, except for my son, and I knew her attitude got in between her and happiness but she was a grown woman and it would be up to the world now to teach her the lessons she needed to learn. All that said, I wasn’t going to let her take a bite out of me whenever the mood struck.

  Now, Russ? Russ was born easygoing and nonjudgmental. Oh, we’d had some issues like him not being forthcoming with a bad grade or him breaking curfew and when he was in high school, beer went missing now and then. But overall? He seemed happy to stay with the program and, mostly, he did what he was supposed to do. Maybe playing sports had a lot to do with it, because they put demands on his time that he had to meet if he wanted to play. But I will never understand why he fell in love with Alice and married her. He dated so many cute girls who were so sweet. Ah well, I’m not the only mother in the world who ever pondered that question.

  My phone rang. It was the Confrontational One. I sighed and took the call.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “You’re sure I really don’t need to quit my stinking stupid job and come to South Carolina?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Do you want to talk about work? How’s it going?”

  “It’s going nowhere, that’s how. I mean, you want to talk about doing thankless work with a bunch of drunks?”

  She went on for at least fifteen minutes about her horrible lot in life and I listened like the dutiful mother should. Which is to say, I offered no unwelcome solutions.

  “So what are you thinking about? I mean, is there something else you’d like to be doing?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! I mean, the money’s good but I’m so tired when I get home! I don’t feel like getting up and going to auditions, if I even had them to go to that is. My agent hasn’t done shit for me.”

  “Language!”

  “Whatever. Anyway, maybe I should get another agent.”

  Okay, it’s not like I never used the word myself but never in front of my children and I still believed that children were supposed to curse among themselves, not in front of adults. And here was another stellar example of Sara taking license. We are not and will never be peers.

  “Well, honey, you’re the only one who can answer that question.” I could see then that since Addison’s death, Sara may have been brooding all along. It wasn’t easy to be so far away from home, especially when she lost a parent. Maybe a visit to the Lowcountry would do her some good. “Listen, how’s
this? When Aunt Daisy gets out of the hospital and comes home, why don’t we find you a cheap ticket to come here for a few days? I think it would do her a world of good to see you. And Ella, too.”

  “Awesome! Yeah, I’d love that. Let me see when I can get some time off.”

  “Yeah. Just remember, there’s no urgency, Sara. Honestly, there isn’t. If, heaven forbid, her condition changes I’ll get you here right away.”

  “Okay. Mom?”

  “Yep?”

  “This John is a nice man?”

  “Let me tell you how nice . . .”

  By the time I finished telling her about how he picked up Aunt Daisy from the bathtub, called 911, and then sat up all night at the hospital with Ella and me, her tune was in a different pitch altogether.

  “Wow,” she said. “Mom, he sounds like amazing.”

  “Look, there’s no reason for anyone to get excited about John Risley. He is my friend and if that status changes, I’ll let you know that, too.” No, I won’t.

  “Yeah, I guess when you’re your age, you have to take what you can get.”

  Now, what kind of an assessment was that?

  “Um, I’m not so sure what that meant . . .”

  “Wait! I meant, you know, you don’t have, you know, sex and stuff.”

  “Sara Cooper! Go wash your mouth out with soap!” She should only know, I thought.

  She laughed and said, “Yeah, I’ll get right on that! See ya, Mom! Love ya!”

  And the Contentious One was gone. For the moment. I had not told her about my budding career as a playwright or Piccolo Spoleto or that John had suggested Sara to possibly play Dorothy Heyward. So far all I had were notebooks filled with notes and a lot of Xerox copies of Dorothy’s and DuBose’s letters. And I had not droned on about the Charleston Renaissance as I was now inclined to do whenever I got my hands on the mike. But I had raised her spirits and introduced the idea of me having a friend of the opposite sex in a way that I thought seemed reasonable and acceptable to her. No sex, huh? Is that what twenty-five-year-olds thought? That their parents didn’t get it on like jungle animals? That they had cornered the market on that pastime? My children would drop dead if they knew. Drop dead on the floor.