Colony (3 page)

“Where?” she said.

“Dead,” I said, and picked up my package of banana and peanut butter sandwiches and headed out into the morning woods.

One month later, on a still afternoon of sullen gray warmth, a great black Packard touring car with buttoned side curtains and a hood that seemed miles long came wallowing up the pitted gravel drive and stopped in front of the veranda. It was spattered with gray mud from the November rains, and yellow

leaves were plastered to its window glass. At the wheel my brother, Kemble, in moss-green tweed, grinned at Aurelia and me; we had hurried to the veranda to see what sort of vehicle could be making such a commotion. Kemble usually came in one of Creighton King’s spartan taxis from the train station.

From the front passenger seat, a long narrow face with a long narrow nose and a shock of pale hair grinned over a car-filling cloud of white lilac branches. The grin was as white as the blossoms, but the rest of the person was invisible behind flowers and foliage. The flowers were like nothing I had ever seen, exotic and impossibly perfect, incompatible with known life. We do not have those great, swelling, spilling trees in the coastal South. The face above the bouquet was as alien as the flowers. We do not have those attenuated, gilded faces in the Low Country, either. They are conceived, cell and matter, beside colder oceans, in sharper air.

Strangeness and something else I could not name, something breath-stopping and near to panic, swamped me. I turned and ran into the house, banging the screen door behind me, and thumped up the stairs to my room. I heard Kemble yelling my name from the veranda steps, and Aurelia screeching at me, and then I heard his voice—Peter’s—for the first time in my life, soft and full of the flat, atonal music of Boston: “Please come back. I promise I’m harmless.”

It sounded like “hamless.” It was, in his accent, a funny word somehow. It made me smile even as I slammed the door to my room, cheeks burning angrily at my own foolishness. It made him seem, indeed, harmless. It made me able to come back downstairs, smiling stiffly, neck and face still hot and red, and put my hand out to him.

It was the first thing I fell in love with, Peter’s voice.

“I’m Peter Chambliss,” he said, “and you can only be Maude. I’m glad to meet you, finally.” He held my hand while he spoke. His was warm and dry and callused across the palm. From sailing, he said later.

“Whut on earth wrong with you?” Aurelia said. “Yo’

comp’ny think you raised like a hog in the woods.”

“I’ve seen ’em scream and faint at the first sight of Peter, but you’re the only one who ever ran like a rabbit, Buckeye,”

Kemble said.

He hugged me, smelling of tobacco and aftershave and the rich leather interior of the car. My head came only to his armpit. It was why he called me Buckeye; I was little and round and dark. I hated the nickname.

“What’d you think, that the Yankees were coming to get you?” My brother had been laughing at me all my life, in precisely that tone.

“No,” I said, stringing out the drawl until it was a caricature of all Charleston voices, thick and mindless, “I thought my drawers were about to fall off.”

Aurelia screeched again, a wordless squall of outrage, and my brother stared at me with his mouth open, and Peter Williams Chambliss laughed with unfeigned delight. It was the youngest sound I could ever remember hearing.

It was the second thing I fell in love with, his laugh.

“When it’s time for that,” he said, “I’ll let you know.”

Aurelia screeched again, but it was a mock screech of indul-gence and relief. She was as at home with this sort of drawing-room badinage as she was with the sweet, fluting Gullah that the blacks spoke down on Dock Street. This was how it was done; this was the ritual; this faintly sexual parry-and-thrust was the very glue of Charleston society. This long thin outlander was, after all, a gentleman, one of us. Fit for the only daughter of Miss Caroline Brundage of Tradd Street. I thought in that moment, listening to that honeyed screech, that Aurelia had glimpsed the future, hers and mine, and found it secure.

I glimpsed nothing but a pure shining-white void. Belleau and the swamp forest were not in it.

“No,” I said. “I’ll let
you
know.”

This time they all three laughed. I felt a small frisson that was pleasure at a social sally well received, though, as I had never felt it, I did not recognize it then.

“The lilacs are for you, for the dance,” Peter said. He put them into my arms. I could scarcely see over or around them; I saw his face through a dazzle of white petals, through a cloud of sweetness that made my throat close and my eyes tear. They were wet with the droplets from the old oaks over the driveway, which held the moisture from that morning’s rain.

“Thank you,” I said, thinking that no girl entering her first Saint Cecilia ballroom had ever held such a thing as that bouquet. I would be the talk of Charleston, coming in the company of a Boston Yankee from Princeton University and carrying such an extravagant explosion of alien Yankee flowers. Not the thing, not the thing at all.

Suddenly I loved the idea.

“Every old trout in town will be talking about them, and you too,” I said, smiling at him. “You’ll probably have to marry me and make an honest woman of me without ever laying a finger on me. These flowers will do it by themselves.

Poor you.”

My brother still stared at me open-mouthed. What vamping demon had slipped unseen into his unworldly little swamp rabbit of a sister? Aurelia frowned; enough in this vein was enough. Peter lifted his sandy eyebrows. His eyes were, I thought, the clear gray of creek ice.

“Are they…excessive?” he said. “Will they embarrass you?

They came from the place in Boston we get all our flowers; my sister, Hermie, had them for her wedding. I brought them all the way down here on the train in a pail of water, with wet cheesecloth over them. But I assure you it won’t hurt my feelings if you’d rather have something…smaller. We’ll call your florist and I’ll run in and get whatever you—”

“No,” I said. “They’re just right. They’re perfect. They’re beautiful. I never smelled anything so heavenly. How on earth did you think of lilacs?”

“Your name,” Peter said. “You know, the old song, ‘Come into the garden, Maude, where the lilacs spread their shade….’ I’ve always liked them best of any flower. We have two huge old trees in Maine, and in June you can smell them for miles.”

“Come on in and let’s have a drink before supper,” Kemble said to Peter Chambliss. “Maudie is no doubt going to vanish upstairs to do mysterious things to her hair and face—at least I hope she is—and I’ll bet anything Dad’s still out in the swamp. Does he even remember tonight’s the Saint Cecilia, Aurelia?”

“Prob’ly not,” Aurelia said. “But he remember when he see that car. Where you git that thing, Kemble? You ain’t bought it, is you?”

“Peter rented it from Rhett Gittings when we got here.

What’s the matter, don’t you think it’s grand enough for the Saint Cecilia?”

“Lawd God, Kemble, Rhett Gittings—” Aurelia began.

“Oh, he doesn’t use it for funerals.” Kemble grinned. “It belongs to his uncle from Savannah, who hardly ever uses it. Don’t worry, ol’ Buckeye won’t go to the ball reeking of formaldehyde.”

I began to giggle and then to laugh. I couldn’t help it. First that outrageous, unseemly, magnificent acre

of white lilacs, and then the undertaker’s uncle’s car.

“I thought, since we obviously couldn’t get a horse and carriage out here, this was the nearest thing to a closed carriage that we’d find,” Peter said.

I stopped laughing and looked at him. His long, tanned face was anxious. Kemble had undoubtedly been telling him some of the rituals and traditions of the Saint Cecilia, and he had remembered that one of the most cherished was to go to your first ball in a closed carriage, with a proper roof and doors that shut solidly. That substantial
thunk,
up and down the old streets south of Broad on Saint Cecilia night, was as right and proper a sound as the
chink
of softly burnished old silver, the
ting
of cloudy old crystal.

It was a tender, cherishing small gesture to bring me a carriage, one a mother might make, or a father…but my mother never could and my father never would have.

I smiled at Peter Williams Chambliss, standing there in the dim fustiness of my foyer on Wappoo Creek. This man was not, after all, a stranger. This man had come bringing with him lilacs from his family’s heritage and a closed carriage from mine. Whatever he had come for, it was not to harm me. A wash of giddy joy swept me like a rip tide. Tonight…oh, tonight! Tonight would be all right, after all. Tonight I would know just what to do….

“Aurelia, would you put these in water for me, please?” I said grandly, as if I had bidden her to do just that every day of my life. “I’m going to go up and…do some things. Peter, you and Kem make yourselves at home in the drawing room.

Dinner will be about six-thirty.”

“Dinner be whenever I gits it on the table,” Aurelia said under her breath, but she took the flowers and went out with them, burying her face in their petals.

“Ummmm,
ummm
,” I heard her murmur.

“Are there any spirits in the drawing room, Modom?”

Kemble called after me. “Or shall I ask Jeeves to fetch some from the cellar?”

“There’s enough left of that stuff you bought from Shem Waller over on John’s Island to lay you up for three days, Kemble Gascoigne, just like it did last time,” I yelled down at him from the stairs. Somehow I did not care what I said around Peter Chambliss. The afternoon was as bright and strange as if I had been drinking champagne. The last thing I heard as I slammed my bedroom door shut was Peter’s laughter.

Oh, that night. It was, for me, the first of those moments that divide time, so that you think in terms of before and after. Was it before the war or after? Did it happen before the Saint Cecilia Ball or after? It was late that night, home once more and lying in my familiar white tester bed, staring up into the starched muslin canopy where I had stared for all the nights of my seventeen Novembers, that I first thought of time and life as anything but a smooth continuum. I had, I realized, thought about it, if I thought at all, as a kind of seamless brush-stroke arc, all the same color and value and thickness, stretching languidly from my birth to the faraway, unseen, unimaginable point of my death.

But now I saw clearly that life and time were like the readings of a seismograph; that life flowed—or careened, or plummeted, or soared, or perhaps merely slogged—forward from a series of spasms, or shocks, as clearly traceable as the activity of a series of quakes. And that it was entirely possible, many years later, to look back and see just where each quake had occurred and what sort of tracery it left…or what sort of damage. It was a frightening concept, and I shook with it as much as anything else that night as the moonlight on Wappoo Creek grew old: that I was and forever would be vulnerable to the random

spasms of my life, great or small, and that tonight the first of the great ones had struck me. What pattern, what tracery, it left upon the graph was not up to me, and in any case it hardly mattered.

Just before I went downstairs that night I looked at myself in the cloudy old pier glass that had been my mother’s, which stood in the corner of my bedroom. The fashion that year was for formal gowns cut to the knee in front but trailing out behind in a small train; they had dropped waists and were often so heavily beaded it was not possible to sit in them.

Fortunately for me, girls at their first Saint Cecilia Ball wore floor length drifts of pure white cut in the chaste, full style of debutante balls everywhere and in all times; I would have looked, as Kemble said when he sent me the dress, like a chambermaid in a bad French farce in one of the current gowns.

But this dress was pure legerdemain. In it I looked…not real. Not me. Not round and low to the ground but tall and willowy and anchored to earth only by the white slippers that had come with the dress. This dress had thousands cf tiny crystal pleats from neckline to billowing hem, cinched at the waist by a satin sash that spilled little crystal beads down the front, and a shallow boat neckline that flared into puffed, pleated sleeves but left my shoulders bare. The label in the dress and on its box said Fortuny; it did not shame me in the least that it was Aurelia, not I, who had caught her breath in recognition of that name when the package came.

After all, she had had far more to do with ballrooms than I.

“Well, he know what it take to turn a mule into a race hoss,” she had said that day, and I had scoffed and for a long time refused to try the dress on. But then one night after dinner I had, and saw what she had seen when she had first held up its spindrift stuff.

How had he known?

In the old mirror, its wavy greenish surface like looking into a forest pool, I leaned to meet this spectral woman who stood…or floated…in my childhood bedroom. Aurelia had come in while I was brushing my thick black hair, said, “No, not tonight,” taken the brush from me, and silently piled my hair into a high coil that gave back light like lacquer. Then she had brought from her apron pocket a little velvet sack and taken from it a string of single pearls like sea water at dawn, perfect and luminous, and fastened them around my neck. Together and in silence we had looked at my image in the mirror, and then she said, “Your mama wore these at her first Saint Cecilia. Your granddaddy give ’em to her. She wore

’em at her wedding, too. She give ’em to me to keep for you not long before you was born; she say she ’fraid she gon’

forgit, what with one thing and another, and she know as sure as she born yo’ daddy would. I kep’ ’em in with the string of beads yo’ grandmama give me when Duke and me got married and come out here to yo’ mama. Mine’s jet; they looked real pretty together, them and these pearls. But not half as pretty as they look on yo’ neck. You act as pretty as you look tonight, Maude, an’ yo’ mama and daddy be real proud of you.”

“What about you?” I had said.