Bulls Island (5 page)

“Actually,” I said, “we have kind of a long tradition in our family of receptions at the Hibernian.”

“The
Hibernian
? LAW!”

Louisa gasped as though I had suggested a keg party with plastic cups at the worst dump of a broken-down shack on Folly Beach. Men without shirts and girls in coconut bras hopping around in conga lines, eating corned-beef sandwiches and cannolis. I could see that my intemperate future mother-in-law was hallucinating scene after scene of her own social suicide.

Even at that age I knew she was completely wrong and that her behavior was preposterous, but it would have been a terrible gaff to object at the table. J.D. would have to explain the facts to his mother later. Besides, St. Mary’s Church was gorgeous and it was the closest
place to heaven in Charleston and maybe on earth, except for the Vatican. And the Hibernian? The Hibernian Society hall was a fabulous, glamorous place for a dinner dance.

I looked to Mother, who was just flabbergasted and filled with disgust. I could read her mind: Louisa Langley was an insufferable snob, she was thinking. Was this to be my life? I would be railroaded into accepting my mother-in-law’s choices for everything? I could feel bile rising in my throat. I looked to my mother’s narrowed eyes for support, but her jaw was locked as she stared at her plate, clicking her fork against the rim of it and making high-pitched
ting
sounds. She would not make eye contact with me. I knew she thought Louisa and Jim Langley had been informed beforehand that this would be an evening of great importance and that Louisa’s demeanor was unbelievably cold. Big Jim was nice enough, but he couldn’t make up for Louisa.

Things were not going well. At all. With every thought the McGees had, Louisa Langley had another. Louisa was not satisfied to merely host the rehearsal dinner and provide the flowers for the church, which we knew would be extravagant.

“But that’s tradition,” Big Jim said, trying to be the voice of reason.

“But, dahlin’! J.D. is mah only child,” she said with the pout of a two-year-old child.

Louisa wanted control of everything. She always did. So she became more cantankerous and my mother struggled to remain calm. On and on the verbal sparring and innuendo went, like something molten from hell, rolling across the rug, climbing the walls, ruining the night. The storm outside still raged as if Mother Nature had been hired to provide special effects.

“Will you all be serving spaghetti and meatballs?”

“No,” my mother said.

“Well, does the chef at the Hibernian know how to cook Italian
food? Or is his specialty corned beef and cabbage? You know, lots of potatoes and starchy things?”

“Only on St. Patrick’s Day,” my mother said nicely, but I could see she was annoyed.

To the complete mortification of the rest of us, Louisa and my mother, Adrianna, were engaged in a full-blown “sandbox” contest of wills.

Finally, the dinner plates were removed and a slice of warm peach pie was placed before each of us. Three empty wine bottles stood on the buffet like generals over a bloody battlefield. It occurred to me that that was a lot for six people in addition to champagne. J.D. and I each nursed a small glass, as wine was not our drink of choice. Like most young people of college age, we drank beer.

“Dinner was delicious, Mother,” J.D. said, attempting to lower the sweltering emotional temperature of the room.

It was no use. The continuing swell of my parents discomfort had caused my mother to stop eating entirely. My father cleared his throat.

“Tell me this, Elizabeth dear. Will you have the courage to wear white?” Then Louisa Langley actually cackled.

I could feel the heat rising in my body and knew my face was bloodred. I did not answer her terribly inappropriate question.

“Adrianna?” my father said. “I think we have enjoyed the Langleys’ hospitality long enough.”

“Ahem.” Big Jim spoke up. “You probably shouldn’t drive in this weather, Vaughn. Why don’t we go in my study for a cigar?” He said all this with honest concern. But when Louisa arched her eyebrows at him to encourage my parents’ departure if they wished to leave, he slammed his fist on the table and added, “Dammit, Louisa, but I just don’t think anyone should be out on the dark roads in this kind of rain. Just look at the trees!”

It was true. The sky, black as pitch, was rent every other minute with crackles and jagged bolts of lightning, piercing the horizon in a dozen places at once. It was all I could do to stay in my chair as the French doors around the room nearly succumbed to the storm. In those terrifying blasts of light you could see branches sweeping the ground, seeming to wail in protest against the wind and rain. No doubt children everywhere were crouched in corners, appliances were unplugged, rosaries were being said, and no one was on the telephone. Only a damn fool was driving unless it was a matter of life and death.

Big Jim was right, but my father was already on his feet, pulling my mother’s chair away from the table.

“We’ll be fine, thank you,” my father said as drily as you might imagine anyone who’d hung on to a remaining shred of dignity in his situation would.

“Vaughn? Maybe we
should
wait until the storm passes?” my mother said, hesitating, and then took my father’s arm when she saw the “good riddance” in Louisa’s expression.

“You’ll bring Betts home later?” Daddy said to J.D. “When the storm passes, of course.”

“Yes, sir.” The severity of his disappointment in his mother was all over his face. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”

“Daddy?”

He turned to me as I walked with him and Mother to the door. His eyes seemed so tired. I didn’t know what to say to him. He was insulted, as he should have been. Mother was furious and I didn’t blame her. The good intentions of the dinner had been doomed from the start and then overrun by Louisa Langley. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know quite what to do. I was very nervous about my parents leaving in anger, but it wasn’t my place to tell my father not to go.

“Please be careful, Daddy.”

“You know I will, sugar.”

“Love you, Momma,” I said, and hugged her with all the strength I had left in me. The torture session Louisa called a dinner party had worn me out.

Momma took my face in her hands and looked deep into my eyes. She said, “Listen to me, sweetheart. Love can work miracles. It happens every day. Wake me up when you come in so we can have a good look at this ring together, all right?” She winked at me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “My girl!”

“All right. I will.” I hoped she was right about the miracles. “Love you!”

“Love you, too, baby! Vaughn? Give me the keys. I’m driving!”

My father reached into his pocket and gave the car keys to her without argument. Well, that was a relief. At least Momma wasn’t going to let Daddy drive with so much booze in him. She was sober or seemed so.

When I went back to the dining room, Louisa—that is,
Miss Louisa,
as I would become accustomed to calling her—had disappeared.

“Where did your mother go?” I asked J.D.

He just shrugged. He never said an unkind word about his mother. Never. Tonight it drove me mad.

“I sent her to bed,” Big Jim called from his study. “She’s as drunk as forty goats. You two come on in here for a minute.”

Oh brother, I thought, here comes a lecture to explain why there’s nothing wrong with Mrs. James David Langley IV and how it’s going to be so great to be Mrs. James David Langley V. Well, he could try his best to excuse her behavior to us, but Mrs. Beelzebub was a formidable opponent.

We ambled into Big Jim’s study, which was small but beautiful. Highly polished dark wood paneled the walls and his bookcases were filled with leather-bound books and stacks of
National Geographic
magazines intermixed with photographs of fish he had caught, vin
tage Chris-Crafts he had owned, and pictures in brass frames of relatives long gone to glory. He was standing at his wet bar, pouring himself a whiskey from a decanter into a tumbler with no ice. The room smelled like leather and cigars. I loved it.

“I’d offer y’all something stronger than a Coke, but I know
you
still have to drive tonight, son.”

“It’s okay, Dad. You’re right.” Then J.D. turned to me. “You want something?”

Yeah, to run away, just for a while, I thought.

“No, I’m fine. Thanks. I’ll get it if I change my mind.”

“Fine. Well then…let’s sit together for a moment.”

I took a place on the corner of the brown corduroy sofa next to J.D. and Big Jim sat in a club chair, upholstered in a fabric printed with men on horseback dressed for a race to the hounds that I wouldn’t buy in a thousand years, but somehow it looked right in that environment. I had a lot to learn about things like decorating, I told myself.

“Son? Betts? Mother did not show well tonight.”

Was Louisa Langley a show dog? No, but she was a prize bitch, I thought.

“Boy, you can say that again,” J.D. said, in a rare moment of candor. “She was really difficult.”

I was silent until Big Jim looked at me.

“We all have bad days,” I said. I mean, what was I supposed to say?

“Well, I apologize for that,” he said. “She said quite a few things that I thought were unnecessary. Entirely unnecessary.”

“Well…,” I said, and waited for him to continue, which he promptly did.

“Louisa has certain silly ideas in her head and she always has had them. Now, me? I’m much more pragmatic about life. What’s in the past is in the past, and believe me, Betts, I know Louisa’s heart.”

Oh? She has one? I wanted to ask, but did not.

“She’ll come around,” Big Jim said, continuing. “She’s just used to having her own way all the time and I guess she might not have realized that her baby is a grown man who’s ready to settle down.”

“Probably not,” I said, being generous.

Big Jim harrumphed, knowing that his attempt at an explanation had been insufficient and that all present knew Louisa was going to be a nightmare for me. Forever.

“There are other things that concern me, however. Other things.”

“Like what?” J.D. asked. “Dad, Betts and I have been dating since we were practically children! You all expected this, didn’t you?”

“Yes, well,
I
did anyway. Any fool can see the love between you all, and I’ll tell you, it’s a marvelous thing to witness. Y’all light up the room with all that passion…well, would you listen to me going on like passion is a thing of my past? Hell, I’m still a virile—”

“Dad!” J.D. said, looking at him and then me in mock horror.

Big Jim’s virility was about the last thing on earth I wanted to hear about. He was in his cups, and anyway, the entire Western world knew he had a fondness for, well, girls with a generous nature.

“Yes, well, anyway…where was I? Right! What about graduate school? I mean, what if a baby comes along? They do that, you know…come along. Babies, that is.”

“Well, we’ve talked about that and J.D. is going to Carolina Law School and I know I’m still going to business school there…I mean, there’s no reason why we can’t do that, right?”

“Of course not!” J.D. said. “There are no plans to start a family this year. I think we can manage, Dad.”

“Both of you at Carolina?”

“Yeah, I mean, we’re both accepted for the fall semester and there’s no reason why we can’t go, right?”

“Hmmph,” Big Jim said. “How are you two going to plan a wedding and go to school at the same time?”

“Well, J.D. and I haven’t talked about that yet, but I think my mother has been planning this since the day I was born,” I said.

“That’s fine with me,” J.D. said. “That’s her privilege, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t take it away from her,” I replied, implying that, if necessary, I would defend my mother’s territory.

“Somehow I can’t envision you all living in married students’ housing and eating hot dogs. Think you’re gonna live on love, do you?”

“Why not?” J.D. said.

“We can work, too,” I said. “In fact, I’ve been offered a part-time job in the business school correcting statistics papers. Working with Professor Klinger. He’s a former partner at Merrill Lynch.”

For minimum wage or less. I had not even asked what the salary was to be. I knew my prospects for financial independence sounded pitiful, but the most promising thing about going to graduate school was that J.D. and I wouldn’t be living around Louisa for a few years. And I knew my parents would help us.

“No matter. You’re industrious, Betts, and I respect that, but my son was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. So were you. Y’all haven’t got the first clue about how to be poor and happy.”

“Oh, that’s not true, Dad! We’ll get along just fine.”

Big Jim sat back in his chair and smiled at us. “Listen, I want to try to make up for your mother’s poor performance with a little engagement gift. Langley Construction and Development is putting up some very nice condos not too far from the campus in Columbia. I’ve got a nice little three-bedroom unit put aside and I’d like y’all to have it. When you graduate, you can sell it…or whatever you want to do. How’s that?”