Islands (15 page)
I have always loved the sensory particulars of St. Michael’s. Its steeple, slender and white and topped with a gilt ball, is visible from the places I frequent most: my office, the Bull Street house, the beach house. It is a presence in my life. It has a living history that I love. It was painted black during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars so that it would not be visible to the vessels bombarding the city from the harbor. It has survived earthquakes, fires, and, in my time, Hurricane Hugo. Once, at a party for the benefactors of Queens Hospital, I met an aristocratic old German who said, when I asked him if he had visited the city before, “Not precisely. But I have seen the steeple of St. Michael’s through a periscope.” Whether or not he was to be believed, it made my blood cool for a moment, the thought of that silent black leviathan lying deep in the harbor waters, its great-stalked eye fixed implacably on us.
The bells of St. Michael’s have lifted my heart for many years, at noontime and sunset. Their bronze song can be heard all over downtown. They have been stolen by the British, buried in Columbia during the Civil War, shipped back to Whitecastle to be recast twice. On this day of autumn rain and wind, they rang sweetly for Charlie Curry. I knew that it must be a great comfort to Camilla and Charlie’s family and friends, and I know that it was to me, that their voices lifted as truly for an Indiana outlander as they did for the departing souls of the original families. I remembered something that Fairlie had said once, in some pet or other over one of the hampering Charleston mores, “No matter where you go or who you are, and no matter where you want to fetch up, Charleston will get you in the end.”
But it had not, after all, gotten Charlie. Perhaps St. Michael’s held the city’s collective memories of him, but the green Atlantic of the island had his body and essence. It was not, I thought, such a bad split.
The church was packed with quiet people who nodded and smiled politely at me and more warmly at Lewis, and gave Camilla small hugs and cheek-brushing kisses. They smelled of wet wool and lavender and somehow of incense, though I doubted that the church burned it anymore. An odor, perhaps, of sanctity. After the service, which was as beautiful and graceful as the old church and as anchored in years, the congregation moved up the aisles and out onto the Tuscan portico. Camilla and her sons and their wives and children stood there to receive their soft murmurs of sympathy and love. Camilla seemed a perfect part of them there in her black suit and pearls, taken back into the bloodstream of the city, moving, as if oiled, to the cadences and rhythms that, I knew, I would never hear. Somehow it made me uneasy. What if she simply stayed?
But as her sister Lydia’s town car glided to the curb to pick them up for the short trip to the Battery, she turned and made a little circle in the air with her thumb and forefinger.
“One down,” she said almost under her breath. We all smiled. We had her still.
Lila and Simms’s house is a three-story brick Charleston single, with accents of the Greek revival that was popular in the early nineteenth century, when it was built. It has white-railed piazzas on all three floors, and a rose-arched doorway off the street and into the ground-floor piazza, where the official front door is. It is one of the most beautiful houses on East Battery, though not so grand as some built later and iced like wedding cakes with architectural details from two dozen centuries. The houses on the Battery, East and South, are a stunning sight, looking as they do over the great seawall or through the huge oaks of White Point Gardens, at the Ashley River or straight out to sea. The Battery is what most people think of when they think of Charleston, and it may be one of the most photographed streets in the world.
It is also one of the most tourist thronged. Even on this day of cold, sheeting rain, flocks of umbrellaed and anoraked visitors slogged along the broken old sidewalks, looking alternately at the sodden guidebooks clutched in their hands and up at the houses. People going into Lila and Simms’s house had to park blocks away, or maneuver around knots of people standing still and staring as they entered the piazza door, hoping for a glimpse of the fabled garden and old Charlestonians in situ. For some reason, these sightings are greatly prized. I remember once, just before rounding the brick wall onto Bull Street with a load of clothes for the dry cleaner in my arms, hearing a small group talking on the other side of the wall.
“It’s funny that you never see any of the natives,” a shrill female Long Island voice said. Just then I came into the street and nodded as I put the clothes in my car.
“Oh, there’s one,” the same voice announced.
“
Nativus horribilis,
” I murmured to myself, driving away and seeing them in the rearview mirror, staring after me.
One of the Howard house’s unique features, much chronicled, is the double drawing room on the third floor. The two great receiving spaces are joined by doors that fold back to allow a ballroom-size vista, which is what I suspect it was originally used for. Simms and Lila had few balls, except for their daughter Clary’s debut, and so, except for house tours, the third floor was rarely used. The Howards lived in the second-floor library and the little sitting room off the kitchen, where a fireplace and a TV hid. In warm weather, living was done on the first- and second-floor piazzas, shaded from the street by a brick wall shrouded in roses and Confederate jasmine vines.
I had been in the first- and second-floor rooms and on the piazzas and in the garden many times, but I had seldom seen the drawing rooms polished and glowing with candlelight and ablaze with flowers, or alive with people. It looked, in the dim light from the cascading rain at the tall windows, as it must have looked in the days of its original glory, during Charleston’s golden age of balls and receptions and great, nine-course dinners. A long Hepplewhite table had been set up in the center of the second room, laden with Lila’s grandmother’s thin, translucent old Haviland and heavy Revere tea and coffee services. A huge ham glistened at one end, and at the other, a towered, tiered silver dish held little biscuits with ham and beef tenderloin and deviled crab. The enormous silver epergne in the center, which had belonged to one of their ancestors from the time of the lords proprietor, I forget which, spilled sugared fruit and magnolia leaves and pink and green poinsettias. Christmas, I thought. Of course. It was almost Christmas. There was every succulent dish that Charleston claimed as its own, including the ubiquitous shrimp and grits and the crab cakes and the platters of little roasted doves. Charlie would have loved the food, I thought. I didn’t know how he would have felt about the gathering itself. It was studded with people who, I knew, had never thought him a suitable match for Camilla, but had been far too polite ever to say so. But Charlie had known, I was sure, who they were.
“I’ll bet he’s fuming right now,” I said to Lewis.
“I’ll bet he’s not,” Lewis grinned. “I’ll bet he’s hovering around the molding waiting for some old lady to choke on a dove bone.”
“What are you two laughing about?” Camilla said, coming up to us and linking her arms in ours. She was smiling.
“Charlie,” I said. “How are you holding up, sweetie?”
“Tolerably well,” she said, and I thought she was. There had been many tears at the memorial service, but as far as I knew, none of them had been Camilla’s. She shone like a beacon in the great gilded room, and people flocked around her as if to a fire.
We took cups of Simms’s grandfather’s light dragoon punch from a dignified waiter passing them on a silver tray and went out onto the piazza. From this top one you could see, as Lewis said, as far as Madagascar. The wind whipped the tops of the wet palms, and the mist from the rain stung our faces, but we did not turn to go in. We stood with linked arms, drinking punch and looking at the amplitude of the sea and sky around us.
“ ‘Sea-drinking city,’ ” Lewis said. “Josephine Pinckney wrote that years and years ago. I’m never in one of these old houses that I don’t think of it. I had it hanging somewhere in our house; I don’t remember where.”
Lewis’s house was farther down the street, toward the turn onto South Battery. You could not see it from where we stood. I was glad. I really think he was, too. But still, to look at this warm sea every day, to breathe its breath, to hear its voice…
“Do you miss seeing the ocean every day?”
“I see a better one every weekend,” he said.
“It’s the same ocean.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Let’s go home,” I said. “I have a great desire to watch TV in bed.”
We took the elevator down to the first floor, where Lila stood greeting latecomers and saying good-bye to others. She turned to us, and all of a sudden I really saw her, saw Lila Howard herself outside the context of the island and the beach house, saw her as clearly as if I were seeing her for the first time. I almost gasped. When had she gotten so thin? Where had the hollows in her smooth cheeks come from, and the smudges under her eyes? She looked like a woman haunted. Somehow I knew that it was not merely grief for Charlie. Dear God, was she ill?
I put my arm around her.
“You okay?” I said. “It was a perfectly beautiful send-off, and Camilla is so grateful. Charlie would be, too. But you look tired to death. You’ve done too much.”
“No, I wanted to do it,” she said, and smiled, and the sad sorcery faded from her eyes. She was Lila again, in her element, as I had always pictured her.
“Where’s Simms?” Lewis said. “I want to say good-bye. I owe him a lunch.”
Her eyes moved away.
“He’s around,” she said. “I’m going to light into him good for abandoning his guests.”
“I’ll go find him,” I said. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’ room, anyway. I’ll never make it home through this rain and traffic.”
“Anny…” Lila’s voice rose, and it sounded flat and thin. I waved at her over my shoulder and dived into the crowd. It was really rotten of Simms to leave her with door duty.
The downstairs powder room was mobbed, and a cluster of dark-clad women stood around it.
I really can’t wait, I thought, and then remembered that there was a tiny, dilapidated bathroom at the end of the piazza, next to the little house where the gardener kept his tools. I trotted toward it. The long sisal runner on the brick floor was sodden; my feet squelched as I went. I reached the door and put my hand on the knob to open it.
“Go ahead,” Simms’s voice, thick and slow, came from inside. “Nobody will see us. Nobody ever comes to this bathroom. Take them off, love. I want to see all of you. I want to touch you all over….”
“Simms, wait, now…,” a woman’s voice said. It was a young voice, small and thin. It did not have the downtown Charleston cadences, the little lilt. The woman was not anyone I knew. I did not think any of us would know her.
I stood stock-still, my ears ringing, my heart pounding sickly. I turned and fled back down the piazza and into the house, trying to arrange my mouth into a smile, feeling a rictus bloom there instead.
“No luck,” I chirped. “Do tell him good-bye for us. And we’ll see you soon….”
I did not say “next weekend at the beach house.” I could not make my mouth form the words. Lila looked at me silently.
“I’ll tell him you said good-bye,” she said. Her eyes were dark and flat. She knew, then. How long? How long had Simms been sneaking into bathrooms with this or other young women? I hated him suddenly. Grief poured in after the hate.
“Take care of yourself. We love you,” I said, and hugged Lila, and we went out into the rain.
“Don’t you feel well?” Lewis said to me on the drive home. I was huddled against the door of the car, my arms wrapped around me. Despite the roaring of the heater, I could not get warm.
“Just a cold trying to start, I think,” I said. “I’m going to make some hot tea and lie down. You want some?”
He didn’t. “But I’ll bring you up a bowl of chili and we’ll have it on trays,” he said. “No wonder you’re cold; we’ve been wet half the day.”
I did not answer. Upstairs I skinned off my clothes and got into a sweatshirt and pants and pulled the covers up to my chin, and turned off my bedside light. When he finally came up, I was asleep at last, drowned in the thick, hot sleep that grief or shock brings.
I woke in the dead of night, in that stopped, still place where nothing moves, time does not go forward, light does not come. I felt literally sick with pain and fear and loss. Charlie’s death could not destroy the web of the Scrubs, I thought. But the acid of Simms’s betrayal might. Finally I got up and sat in the wing chair by the window, and cried. When light finally crept in around the bottom of the blinds, I was done with crying.
I didn’t tell Lewis what I had heard the day before. I never did tell him. Just before dawn I heard Camilla’s voice as plainly as if she had spoken: “The center will hold.”
And after all, through all the years after that day, nothing really happened with them, at least nothing you could speak of. If Simms spent more and more time away from the beach house, well, we knew that the business was expanding rapidly all over the country and even abroad. If Lila was quieter and thinner, if she spent a great deal of time sitting beside Camilla, who often squeezed her hand or teased her into laughter, well, they had been born on the same street, gone to school together, been in each other’s weddings. The affection between them was nothing new. Only I knew, as surely as I have ever known anything, that Camilla knew about Simms, and had long borne Lila up, like a raft, and would continue to do so.
As she had said, the center held.
J
UST BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
1999, with one millennium sliding inexorably into another, we sat in the early dark before the fire in the beach house, reluctant to get up and begin to clear the redolent remnants of our annual Sullivan’s Island Christmas feast. All of us had family celebrations on the day itself, and we would cherish their warmth and the familial chaos that was as much tradition as the smilax ropes on the staircase banisters, and the turkey or duck that was the provender of the family hunters. Few Charlestonians bought their Christmas bird.
The various downtown clans would gather, replete with great-aunts and imperial grandmothers and shrieking children and handsome young men and women home from Princeton and Harvard and Sweetbriar and in a few renegade instances, outposts such as Bennington and Antioch. Whatever living arrangements and leisure-time pursuits and body parts with rings and piercings occupied the collegial young during the school year, they were laid aside for the velvets and satins and blue blazers and bow ties of home.
Christmas was the height of the debutante season, and some of the young women and their families swept giddily from one party or ball to another, often twice or three times a day. That some of the young women would go back to studies of international law or particle physics or forensic medicine in no way impeded the magic of this hiatus.
Just for this time, downtown seemed to me much like it might have been in an earlier, more graceful century. The magnolia leaf and Williamsburg wreaths on doors would not come down until Twelfth Night, and white tapers would burn in tall windows from dusk on. There was a feeling abroad in this particular season that it was necessary and right to bring out the oldest ornaments, the oldest receipts; to sing the oldest carols, to dip in and out of friends’ homes as had been done since the nineteenth century, hugging and crying, “Merry Christmas,” and leaving a small gift or a batch of benne seed cookies.
“Stay and have a drop of eggnog with us,” the visitees would cry, and the visitors would do so. Charleston eggnog is hallowed and potent, often made with the same Barbadian rum that great-great-grandfather used. I often imagined that Christmas morning in many homes south of Broad might be a bit bleary.
Perhaps no one spoke of it, but I thought that the new millennium threatened to change lives and personal ecosystems here more violently than in most places in America. There was simply such a deep well of beautiful stasis. Many of us knew full well and without question who we were until midnight on the thirty-first of December. Who would we be on January 1, 2000? Elsewhere they feared Y2K; here the demon was the necessity of making our way in a totally new thousand years. We did not know how to do that. That sort of change had never visited Charleston. It made no sense, perhaps, but the great, creeping shadow of the impending change stalked the old streets.
“Somehow I keep wanting to look over my shoulder,” Lila said on the night of our Scrubs Christmas dinner. “I know with my mind that nothing will change, not really, but this is the only place that I feel will stay…like it’s always been. Where we’ll stay like we’ve always been.”
“We’re not that now.” I smiled at her. “And I have the fanny to prove it.”
“You know what I mean,” Lila said. I did.
I got up and stretched and walked out onto the porch to clear my food-and-drink-smogged mind. The air was still and very cold for Charleston at Christmas. There would be frost on the spartina in the morning, and a hard freeze inland. Already the suicidal azaleas and camellias that always rush the season downtown wore mantles of sheeting and quilts. My own huge pink Debutante camellias back on Bull Street sported brittle, moth-eaten velvet draperies from Lewis’s Battery house. They had been folded in the attic for many years; perhaps, like the animals in the legend, they would speak at midnight on Christmas Eve, and talk wistfully of the grand, candlelit balls and feasts that they had once presided over.
“Get real,” I said aloud to myself, and looked up at the black, star-pricked sky. The stars seemed to swim so close and burning cold that you could reach up and touch them; the Milky Way was a luminous cloud. I breathed deeply. Over the smells from the house—wood smoke and cedar and wax myrtle from the tree and swags and wreaths we had put up, and Christmas dinner itself—a river of clean, cold salt poured off the sea and into my face.
I hope I die here, I thought, and then remembered that Charlie had, and wept a little, for the place that was never set at the table now, and the tottering old dogs who never ceased sniffing for him. But I still thought that it would be the finest place imaginable to end a life that had been so defined by it.
There was a sharp rap on the glass door, and I looked to see Lewis, gesturing me in.
“Come back in,” his mouth said silently.
“You come out here,” I mouthed.
“Are you crazy?” his lips said. And I smiled and went back inside. For a moment, the house was stale and stifling, but only for a moment. Warmth wrapped me again, and I sat down on the raised hearth, realizing only then that I was shivering. Over the layered aromas of roasted oysters and port-glazed goose—Fairlie’s idea for a change from the turkey or duck we usually had, and a very bad one—the sharp tingle of champagne tickled my nose.
“Time for the toast,” Henry said, handing me a glass and raising his. It was his turn this year. We all raised our glasses.
“To the Scrubs, which were, are, and ever will be,” he said. “And to the next thousand years. To the great blessing of being present at the beginning of the journey. And to Lila and Simms. Merry Christmas. Happy anniversary. Happy millennium.”
We touched glasses all around and cried, “Here, here,” as we had always done, and drank deeply. The crisp froth of champagne washed away the lingering taste of goosey port. We all moved up to hug Lila and Simms. Henry, tall and tawny in the leaping firelight and suddenly so like the Henry I had laughed with all through Mexico that it took my breath away, poured another round, and we drank that, too. Silence fell. For a moment, there seemed nothing to say. It had not been, all told, a comfortable day.
Lila and Simms had been married on the day before Christmas Eve in St. Michael’s, of course, and this day was their fortieth anniversary. Lila had told us in the fall that she and Simms were repeating their wedding vows on this anniversary, and instead of St. Michael’s, wanted to do it here.
“What a lovely idea,” Camilla said. “We should all do it.”
We were silent. There was no “we” for Camilla anymore.
“It’s the place we’ve really been happiest,” Lila had said, not looking at Simms. He said nothing. He nodded. Lewis and I exchanged glances. There was a strange note in Lila’s musical voice, one that I had not heard before. It seemed equal parts iron and tremolo. But then it was gone, and she went on sweetly.
“We always planned to do it on our fiftieth, but I wanted to do it in the same century we were married in. Who knows if we could still get up the church steps ten years from now? And all of a sudden, instead of the big hoo-ha at St. Michael’s, and all the children and grandchildren and half of Charleston, and the reception and endless bad champagne, I just wanted to have it here. Just us. The family is not at all pleased, but we’ve promised them they can have a high holy mass with the archbishop of Canterbury for our fiftieth, if they want to. By then maybe we’ll be too senile to care.”
So we hung a few extra holly wreaths and banked the fireplace in green and white poinsettias, which most of us hated but had been developed in Charleston and had been massed at the altar on Lila and Simms’s wedding day, and lit candles and turned off the lamps and, by fire and candle and tree light only, Lila and Simms Howard reaffirmed their vows.
They had chosen late afternoon, instead of seven o’clock, when the original ceremony had taken place, because Simms had a command performance later on at his company’s Christmas party, and did not feel he should break tradition. His grandfather and his father had raised the toast and spoken a few avuncular words each Christmas of their times, and Simms always had, too.
“It seems like bad luck not to do it this time,” he said. “I don’t want to hex the company for the next millennium. I’ll just stay an hour or so. I can probably be back for dessert.”
We all nodded. Some of us smiled. The thought of Simms, stuffed full of goose and champagne and in his khakis and a crew-neck sweater, presiding over the vast, distinctly suburban holiday revels of a medical supply company was an engaging one. As if she could read our thoughts, Lila said, “He has his tuxedo in the car. He says he’ll change in the rest room at the plant.”
Simms grinned and most of us did, too. Lila did not. Neither did I. Would there be a little-used rest room in some tucked-away corner of the plant? Would a honey-haired, silky-skinned young woman with a flat upstate accent wait there for him?
I hated the thought and looked over, involuntarily, at Lila. She was looking straight ahead. I looked at Camilla. She was staring intently at Lila, as if to hold her upright with the sheer force of her gaze. I did not know if it was still going on, Simms and his women. But I knew that Lila, and the rest of us, were forever changed by it, even if most of us did not know it. Even if the center still held, there was a tiny crack now.
“Oh, Simms, who or what could be worth it?” I whispered just before Creighton Mills, more massive and commanding now, but still in his beach clothes, set down his sherry glass and moved to stand before the fireplace. The firelight leaped on his glasses and the cross on his chest, and he wore his clerical collar, but despite these he was still simply one of us.
“Church is in session,” he said, smiling. “Lila, Simms. Will you stand together before me, Simms on my right hand and Lila on my left?”
They moved into their positions. From behind them I could not see their faces, but I could see the faces of those of us who could. Camilla watched, perfectly still, her beautiful face neutral. Henry smiled in simple happiness; pure Henry. Fairlie, beside him, her face smoothed into girlhood by the firelight, reached for his hand. Camilla’s eyes moved briefly to them, and then back to Lila and Simms.
“ ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony…’ ”
Creighton Mills’s beautiful voice and the flickering firelight were hypnotic. Our days and nights in the place seemed to unroll before me like a strip of film. The Scrubs rushing me into the surf on my first day here, laughing. Fairlie and Henry doing the shag ankle deep in the rushing green and white water, to show me how it was done. Henry and Lewis heading out with their surf-casting gear while Fairlie, stretched out in the hammock, said, “Don’t even think of bringing those fish in here.” Camilla, alone and far down the beach with Boy and Girl. Lewis and me, naked in the phosphorescent surf, on fire with joy in our every atom. Charlie bellowing with glee as a long flight of pelicans grazed the water just beyond him, “Goddamn! It’s the loan committee!”
Oh, Charlie.
All of us, on my first night, hands on the photo of the Scrubs on the first day they had come into the house as owners, swearing to share our lives forever.
Lila and Simms holding hands as they climbed the stairs from the beach at twilight, their heads bent together, talking earnestly. Talking, talking…
“ ‘…let him now speak or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.’ ”
There was a silence; even the fire seemed to hush its breathing, and then Creighton said, “ ‘Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’ ”
“I will,” Simms said. I could scarcely hear him.
When it was her turn, Lila’s voice rang out as bright and hard as a diamond.
“I will.”
“ ‘Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?’ ” Creigh said.
Camilla got up from the rocker beside the fire, and stood, bent and fragile.
“I do,” she said.
It was an enormously moving moment. Tears glimmered in more than one pair of eyes. In my mind I saw Camilla as she had been on the day I had met her, on the beach under the faded umbrella that we still used, glowing and beautiful, holding out her arms to me, saying to Lewis, “Well, Lewis, you finally got it right.”
I did not really hear the rest of the ceremony, nor see it clearly. Tears blinded my eyes and the past in this place roared in my ears. I heard Simms say “ ‘…to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I plight thee my troth.’ ”
You’d better, you son of a bitch, I thought fiercely.
When Lila repeated the vow, her voice was nearly inaudible.
Simms slipped a ring onto her finger. It was an enormous sapphire, almost the color of Lila’s eyes, and it looked like a great bubble of trapped seawater on her ring finger. She looked at it, and then up at Simms, a perplexed look, as if she had expected to see the small Tiffany solitaire with which he had married her. I wondered how much it had cost. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
“ ‘…Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’ ” Creighton Mills said. Camilla was still in her fireside chair. Her eyes burned into the side of Simms’s face. He did not turn. How could he not have felt those eyes?
“ ‘…I pronounce that they are man and wife,’ ” Creigh said. And instead of the traditional benediction, he paused for a moment, and then said, “ ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.’ ”
“Amen,” we all whispered. We looked around at one another. Creigh Mills caught the looks and grinned and said, “It’s the old collect for aid against perils. Part of the traditional evening prayer. Lila asked for it. Come to that, it’s not such a bad way to end a marriage ceremony, especially in this new millennium. I think I’ll incorporate it in the future. Beats prenuptial counseling by a country mile.”