Outer Banks (4 page)

And the earth cracked open under me, and my father and the Kappa Alpha house and the University of Virginia and the sunflooded cinder track of the athletic field slid into it, and all that I knew of reality and surety slid after them. It wasn't that I thought my father had lied, not then: that was an enormity I did not
perceive until a good bit later. What I thought was that he had been there and no one had noticed, no one remembered. It was worse than a lie. It was, somehow, a death. It was as if I had been living for sixteen years with a ghost. With a handsome, vivid dead man who had an entire splendid and complicated life, knowledge, and a history that no one but I could see. No child can bear it that, to other people, its father does not exist, is nothing. It is, for the child, death in the womb.

I went into the kitchen and swapped stations with dim Bopsy Sturtevant from Colby, who had the tables across the room in an ell, much poorer territory. After that I didn't see the family of Beauchamp Childs again, except at a distance. I will never forget that morning. It was, for me, the end of safety.

That night I borrowed Bopsy's Colby sweatshirt and drank five beers and smoked a Pall Mall and let Stick Chapin kiss me under the Harbour House pier. I bought Bermuda shorts and Weejuns and a circle pin that looked like real gold, and learned all the verses to “Lord Jeffrey Amherst,” and “Going Back to Old Nassau,” and “Roar, Lion, Roar.” I learned, with a loathing that never left me, to sail a Beetle Cat, and to play tennis. I learned when to flirt and when to be enigmatic, when to say no and when to say yes. I did say yes, once, near the end of the summer, to Stick, in the back of his father's Mercedes, but God was good and Stick passed out before the Black Act was accomplished. I learned to dance really well and to drop nicknames and place names with an offhand
élan
that would have delighted my father, and I threw away my Revlon and Max Factor and bought Chapstick and sat endless hours in the sun, with lemon juice scalding the silver ash out of my hair. By the end of the summer it was the streaked tow of every other young woman of a certain station on the Eastern Seaboard.

I did all this with a sense of walking on charged black air; I felt like a soldier picking my way across an endless minefield. But it worked. I came home with an address book full of just the sort
of contacts my father had envisioned, came home the remote young Easterner he had doubtless besieged Heaven for. At home, my peers in Kenmore took one look at me and shied away like nervous colts with a panther about, snickering their scorn and fear, but books were waiting for me, and I dove gratefully into them. Again, they sustained me.

My father was ecstatic. I could not have pleased him more if he had created me by his own hand, molecule by molecule.

“See how easy it is?” he said, over and over, as postcards arrived from Dartmouth, or the phone rang from Northampton.

And such was his power that I soon remembered only that, in a way, it had been the easiest thing I ever did. How truly terrible, that it is easier to live a total lie, become a lie yourself, than to assimilate a hated truth. But it was so for me, infinitely, and it has been so for many of the people I have been the most drawn to. As I said, we know each other, and we find each other. And for a while, we live wonderfully well with the Big Lie.

It will get you, though. It always does, sooner or later. It bites the hands that feed it most assiduously and gratefully. The Big Lie can kill, and it can maim. Of the people closest to me in my own life, six have been victims of it. It stunted my mother and popped my father's skull like a walnut. It froze Ginger in eternal adolescence and me in an endless, featureless white present, trapped in my poisoned garden like Rappacini's daughter. It made a monster of Fig, and shattered Cecie like an eggshell. Of us, only Cecile was able to reassemble herself and dump the Big Lie for reality, take reality into herself like a lover. Only Cecie won. Yes, she did. Never think Cecie didn't win.

I went back to Harbour House the next summer, and the next, my last summer before I went away to Randolph Macon. By then I was so thoroughly Easternized that I chafed in my new, cool, polite way at not being allowed to consider Wellesley or Vassar or Smith. My father never said, but I think perhaps the tuition for the Seven Sisters proved ultimately beyond him. My grades at
James P. Folsom High in Kenmore would have entitled me to a substantial scholarship at any one of them; I had made sure of that. But he would not consider scholarships, or financial aid of any kind.

“That's not for you, Effie,” he said. “That's for the hairnet and health shoe crowd. Randolph Macon is a fine school, you'll meet the same kind of girls there you would further north. After all, it's the South where you'll be spending your life; you'll meet the best of the Virginia boys at Macon. And it was your mother's alma mater. Besides, it's time to learn to ride. You can't live in hunt country if you can't at least sit a horse.”

And so, after that last summer at Harbour House, where I cemented my Eastern facade irrevocably into place, ignoring the wails of my starved heart, I set off for the old white-columned women's college in Lynchburg. I arrived driving my own ancient, sleekly restored and finely tuned green MG sports car, top down, pink with two days of sun and pride, plain of feature and cool of demeanor and immediately indistinguishable from most other freshmen. I was bid, and pledged, Tri Omega without a hitch; it was, my father had said, the best of the three sororities I was even to consider. God knows whose genteel wife he hustled for the recommendation; I never asked and the Tri Os never told me. But I knew that wherever it came from, it must have been impeccable. I was on the First Preferential list. And I don't think my few expensive, exquisitely plain new clothes and the MG hurt, either. My father considered both investments in my future, and perhaps his. The MG had cost him less, in Kenmore, than a new Chevrolet convertible would have; no Kenmore belle would have thought of leaving for the University or Auburn or Randolph without the latter. And none would have driven the ancient MG to a dogfight. Charlie Culpepper tried to talk my father out of it. But Charles Lee's eye for such things never failed him; the MG was the perfect touch.

God knew what it all cost him, the car and the clothes and
that first year's tuition, and the initiation fee for Tri Omega, and the gold and pearl pin, and the house fees, and all the rest. He went deeply and recklessly into debt for them. Joe McClure at Kenmore Bank and Trust made the loan himself.

When I pulled away from the old house on the Santee that September day, my mother cried and kissed me and my father kissed me and did not cry. There was something antic, a kind of capering, crazy glee, in his gray eyes.

“Godspeed, Effie Lee,” he said exultantly. “Don't you come back here without a Kappa Alpha shield. I've written a few letters to brothers whose boys are at Virginia, you should be getting lots of calls.”

My heart contracted with pain and fear at that, but I smiled and waved and said I would do that thing. By the time I reached Lynchburg, I had forgotten it.

It was a good year. The car and the clothes and the sorority were the groundwork, and I worked hard to build on them. I studied prodigiously, and made the freshman honorary. I obediently dated the Virginia KAs who did indeed call, and liked them well enough. I smiled infrequently, and necked never. I got proficient enough on a horse not to embarrass my father; after he saw me riding in the school ring when he and mother visited at Thanksgiving, he sent me a custom-made habit and boots. I still have them, in a trunk in the attic. It amuses Alan no end when I try them on, as I do sometimes. Effie Lee Abrams, sweetheart of the regiment, he calls me.

Randolph Macon was a world that seemed to value my good mind and manners and the Lee nose and name, and did not care if I bubbled or not. I learned some wonderful things and found a grateful and abiding love for learning, and made a few cool, light, seemly friendships, and liked those, and I probably would eventually have married a wellborn young scion who could have made my ravenous, fugitive father secure at last. But in the end, there wasn't time. Late that spring, after receiving no payments at all
from him, Joe McClure called my father's loan at the bank, and the country club and the town merchants who had been carrying him for a long time joined the hunt, and on a sweet, cool May evening my father drove his late model Lincoln down to the banks of the Santee, well away from our house, and shot himself in the mouth with a .32 Smith and Wesson. They didn't find him until the next day. The car was a mess; Charlie Culpepper, who had been thinking reluctantly to repossess it, never did manage to sell it.

“Where did he get that gun? He never had any gun. I never saw a gun in this house in all the years we lived here,” my mother sobbed, over and over. She was frail and diminished and groping, a pretty mistletoe whose host oak had toppled. “He must have borrowed it; it was all an awful impulse…”

Dry-eyed, holding her hands and patting them, my heart stone in my chest, I knew better. I had read the Andrew Turnbull biography of Hemingway in my father's bookcase almost as often as he had. The gun was precisely the same make and model with which Hemingway's father had shot himself and which his monstrous mother had sent him: my father had used Hemingway's gun. He may even have used it for the same reasons that, finally, Hemingway did. It must have been long and carefully planned.

My poor father. Even his death was a lie.

I only cried once during that entire awful time, though my mother and, it seemed, every other woman in Kenmore, wept constantly. The morning after the funeral, J. R. Phipps, the other agent in my father's jury-rigged insurance company, called to say that my father had, the year before, taken out a small policy specifically to benefit my education, and with great care it should see me through one of our state institutions. I did cry then, bitterly and hopelessly and for many hours, cried in my locked room for my father and his sad, malignant foolishness, and for myself, and for Randolph Macon and the vanished East. Cried for the loss of the ersatz accepting life I had found in both, and for all other things forever lost to me. I don't remember crying for my father ever
again. For nearly a year I did not even mention his death.

But I cried for Randolph Macon and the East many more times that next year, for at first I was profoundly unhappy at Randolph University. I had chosen it because it sounded most like the school I had loved and left behind, and I entered the School of Interior Design that fall, and moved into the Tri Omega house my second quarter there. But neither school nor sorority made me welcome. The sorority, for all practical purposes, had to take me, since I was a transfer in good standing, but it was plain that they did not know what to do with me. I knew that my new sisters thought me strange, affected, and as exotically odd looking as a giraffe in my height and slenderness, among all the cinch-waisted and diminutive cheerleaders and fraternity sweethearts and beauty queens. My shyness and reserve and heavy, secret, dead grief they thought to be conceit, and my plain, conservative cottons and tweeds made their crinolines and pushup bras seem very faintly trashy. They never said so, but I saw it in their eyes. I did not dare even unpack the habit and boots. I knew Amherst and Yale songs and wrote to girls named Muffy and Smitty at schools like Wellesley and Sarah Lawrence, and I had seen plays in New York and rode horses and had a cocktail shaker with a Hasty Pudding seal on it. I myself heard the rumors that I knew how to make a martini, and the ones that I was rich and blueblooded. I knew that the Tri Os reveled in the patina I lent the chapter, even as they mimicked my slouch and my cool voice and my habit of going completely without makeup. But they did it behind my back.

The Tri O I was assigned to room with was pinned to an ATO and spent every waking moment until curfew with him, and spent the hours after that pointedly studying in other rooms, coming back to ours only after I had put out the lights, creeping ostentatiously into bed in darkness and silence. She had no classes until eleven in the mornings, and so I dressed in the dark and left the room long before she stirred. If she had not gotten pregnant and dropped out of school to marry her ATO and follow him off
on his summer ROTC cruise, I might not have been able to stick the misery, and I truly don't know what would have become of me then.

But she did, and one afternoon toward Thanksgiving, only a few days after she had gone, my door opened and a girl I had never seen before put a copperthatched head around it and grinned a three-cornered dimple-flickering grin, and said in a precise, Tidewater voice, “Is this the dreaded Temple of the Unclean?”

And I answered, on a rush of lightness and deliverance, “It is. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

“Consider it abandoned,” Cecie said, and tossed a load of clothes into the room and followed them in, and after that everything was all right.

A
T
noon this past Labor Day Alan came out into the garden, where I was ripping witch grass out of the poppies. Next to dodder it is the seaside weed I hate most; it looks like a delicate green mist, but it can choke an entire bed of the crumpled-silk poppies before they even shake out their petals to the sun. I have them in all colors this year: lilac, crimson, scarlet, rose, white, golden yellow, pure burning orange. I put them out this spring, as bedding plants. Bedding plants are as far ahead as I allow myself to plan. I do not plant perennials anymore, only annuals.

Alan was wearing only his faded old tattersall bathing trunks, that he has had, I believe, since the summer we went to Bermuda when Stephen was two. Twenty-five years ago. Almost impossible to believe; looking at Alan, barefoot on the gray weathered deck, he looked nearer twenty-five himself, instead of the forty-eight he is. I thought again how like a Russian dancer he looked, or an
acrobat in the Tsar's circus. That fancy struck me the first time I ever saw him in his undershorts. He was, and is, dark, small, lithe, and perfectly made, with a narrow waist and broad shoulders and slender, sculpted muscles. I still love the feel of his solid body under my hands. I think I would hate the feel of a larger one. He is just as tall as I am when I am not wearing high heels, and his hair and beard are only just now beginning to be threaded with gray. His brown eyes are the brilliant liquid of an adolescent's. Nothing about Alan, bone, tissue, blood, or muscle, has begun to dry out yet. He puts it down to his Eastern European heritage. He is a Jew from Minsk, or his father was, at any rate. Alan grew up in Brooklyn Heights.

“Regular collagen factories, we are,” he says, of his blooming skin and moist mouth and eyes and smooth, sliding movements. “My grandfather Moishe, at a hundred and eight, could still kiss his elbow and jerk off at the same time. Grandma Vera was a belly dancer in the court of the Tsar until she was ninety.”

He sat down on the flattened chaise longue behind me and did not speak. The silence spun out. It made me restless; it broke the mindless fugue of sun on my back and head and sea in my ears, that I had allowed myself to sink deep into. These hot, late-summer days in our garden behind the dunes of Long Island are the most I know of pure timelessness, and they sustain me like air, like water. Finally, without looking over my shoulder at him, I said, “What's up?”

“You got a letter,” he said. “I thought you might want to read it.”

“Not right now,” I said. “Leave it on the table and I'll read it when I stop for lunch. Crab salad okay with you? And I got some Iron Horse at Silver's.”

“I think you ought to read this one now,” Alan said, and then I did turn around on my heels and look up at him. He was smiling, though; no cause there for alarm.

“Is there a return address?” I said.

“Yep. It's from Mrs. P. C. Sibley, Croatan Cottage, Nag's Head, North Carolina. Would that be your friend Ginger Fowler, by any chance?”

I turned back to the witch grass.

“You know it is,” I said.

I went on with my digging, but he did not go away. Finally I said, “Alan, I really don't want to read it right now. I'll do it later. Make us a Bloody Mary and I'll get lunch, and then I'll read it. If I don't get this damned stuff out of here it's going to murder the last of my poppies.”

“The first frost is going to do that anyway,” he said. “Come on, Kate. You've hidden from her for twenty-eight years. Him, too. I want to hear what she has to say even if you don't.”

“You open it, then, and tell me what it says,” I said, aware that my heart had begun to hammer against my ribs, hating the feeling. I have spent the last four and a half years in flight from that awful, breath-sucking fusillade.

“I will,” Alan said, and I heard the sound of paper tearing. Then nothing.

“Oh, shit,” I said finally, getting up and wiping my hands on the knees of my blue jeans. “Okay, let's have it. I hate this intrigue. What does my dear good friend Virginia Sibley, née Fowler, have to say?”

“She says she wants you to come visit her at their place on the Outer Banks the last week of this month. She says she's asking the others of you who shared the suite at Randolph, that it's just going to be the four of you…I gather the divine Paul will not be in residence—and she'd give anything in the world if you'd come. She says it's been more than twenty-five years since she's heard from you, which will not, I gather, be a surprise to you, and she'd have written or called much sooner but nobody knew where you were. That won't surprise you either, I'm sure. She got your address from that new alumni directory Randolph just put out. I sent your name in to it last winter.”

I turned back to the witch grass. It has long, exquisite white roots as fine as hair, that make a matted filigree underground that will eventually shut the soil's nutrients away from whatever seeks to live in it. Even though I loathe it, I have been grateful to it this past summer. It has given me a tangible battle in which to engage myself.

After a while Alan said, “You think you might like to go?”

“No,” I said.

“You ought to, Kate.”

“No. I have too much to do here. Please don't push me on this, Alan. There's nothing of my life left back there. It's all here. It's with you.”

He took a deep breath and let it out. Then he said, “No, it isn't. It isn't here with me. It's here with your sickness. We've been living in your sickness like people live under water. We're drowning in it. And we
will
drown, you will, if you don't get out of it. I want you to go. Katie, you loved this gal once…”

I did not reply. Please don't, I thought, digging deep into the earth with my fingers. Please shut up. Please stop.

“Cecie's going to be there,” Alan said. “Wouldn't you like to see Cecie, after all this time? From what you've told me you'll never have another friend like that.”

I rounded on him fiercely, toppling over from my squat to land on the hot planks of the deck. I was very angry. He had broken one of our primary rules. Over my head a flight of gulls wheeled, and I felt on my flaming cheeks the freshening wind that meant the turn of the tide. The flag snapped out full from its pole beside the steps down through the dunes, down to the beach.

“I especially wouldn't like to see Cecie again,” I said. “Why should I? She's made it abundantly clear she doesn't want to see me. She didn't even come to my graduation. She's never even written. She's never even called. Not once, in twenty-eight years. Why should I want to see her now?”

“You didn't write either,” Alan said. “You haven't called
her, either. Maybe she didn't know where you were. Ginger didn't…”

“I did call her, once. She never called back. And I wrote; she never answered. Besides, she could have found out where I was,” I said. “She knew where my mother lived. She must have known how I was hurting, she must have known why I didn't get in touch…”

“How could she know, unless you told her?” he said. “The truth is, Kate, that you ran. You just up and ran, and you never looked back. Maybe she couldn't call you; maybe something went bad for her, too. You've had some terribly hard knocks, but you're not the only one. Nobody ever is. Ginger says in her letter Cecie has had an awfully hard time.”

I stared at the mass of whitish-green in my hands, seeing in it, not the roots of the killer of my poppies, but the living copper silk of Cecie Hart's hair, as I struggled to anchor a flimsy crown of white wax candles on it. The candles were burning, and Cecie was yelping with laughter and an occasional drip of candle wax, and I was laughing so hard that I thought I would wet the filmy nylon-curtain pants of my harem outfit. We were dressing for the Beaux Arts Ball in our junior year at Randolph, and I was going as Scheherazade and she as Grimm's Snow Queen.

“Be still, Cecie, or you'll burn yourself up,” I heard my young voice gasp, and across the years, heard hers: “ ‘Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea,' ” she chanted. We were reading Dorothy Parker that year. “ ‘And love is a thing that can never go wrong…
and I am Marie of Rumania,' ”
we shouted together.

“That's not all Ginger says,” Alan's voice broke in. “She says, ‘I want you to come because I want to try to tell you how sorry I am about everything. I've known I was wrong to do what I did for a long time now, and I want to try to find a way to make it up to you. I need to know that you have a happy life. I miss you. I think you were the best one of us.' ”

He was quiet, and I knew he was waiting for me to say something. But I did not; other voices filled the silence in my head.

“ ‘…and love is a thing that can never go wrong, and
I am Marie of Rumania.
' ”

Oh, Cecie…

When I first met her, I thought she looked like a garden elf, one of those Disneyesque little plaster figurines designed to peer out from beneath shrubbery or lurk in flower borders. It was not that she was grotesque, it was just that she was so vivid and so tiny. Even on a campus where petite cheerleaders and majorettes were worshiped like pocket Venuses, and taller unfortunates drooped their duck's-ass heads and padded around in soft leather Capezio shells even in January in order to look up sidewise under their Maybellined lashes at stocky, bull-necked, bandy-legged football players, Cecie was small enough to turn heads. Her size was accompanied by a noticeable lack of cuteness; even at four feet ten, Cecie could stalk like a duchess and freeze a fool at forty paces with her round blue stare. The Tri Omegas were always after her to cut her hair, which rioted all over her small head in red ringlets, like a honeysuckle thicket, giving her an antic Orphan-Annie aspect. And her purple-blue eyes were magnified like pansies behind her thick hornrimmed glasses, which completed the Annie look to perfection.

“You'd be so precious if you'd cut your hair and get some harlequins,” I remember Sookie Carmichael saying to her once, after a chapter meeting. “Not that you're not cute as pie now; we all know that. But you're hiding your looks under a basket.” Sookie never quite got it right. “And those clumpy saddle oxfords and thick tweed skirts don't do a thing for your darling little figure. Why don't you let me and Bitsy fix you up? You'd have to beat the boys off with a stick.”

“A firehose would do fine, Sookie,” Cecie said in her precise Virginia voice. I loved that voice. “Besides, if I were just like y'all we'd look like a tribe of pygmies around here. No fraternities
would dare come around, scared they'd get eaten alive. Not that they aren't, anyway. Besides, y'all need me for dramatic contrast. Makes you look better.”

And she smiled, her three-cornered kitten's smile, that set the dimples flickering.

“Well,” Sookie said, not sure if she had been delicately skewered or complimented.

“That was mean,” I giggled to Cecie later. “She only wants you to have a date every night. Fit in. Be happy. All that stuff.”

“She only wants me not to embarrass the chapter by never being asked out,” Cecie snorted. “Lord, she's a fool. Can you imagine me in harlequin glasses with rhinestones?”

I couldn't. Despite her size and her light, sweet voice there was nothing trivial about Cecie Hart. She was smart, she was tough, and she was singleminded in the extreme when it came to her studies. She studied constantly and with relish; she was one of the few people I ever met, besides myself and Fig Newton, who actually liked the process as well as the fruits of it, the A's, the Dean's List, the honoraries. Her clothes were indeed as severe and utilitarian as the chapter thought they were: serviceable tweeds and flannel skirts, plain, good sweater sets, tailored drip-dry shirts and shirtwaists, saddle oxfords. She owned one coat, a venerable camel's hair, and one raincoat, a khaki London Fog. There were few of them, and she took exquisite care of them. She pressed, mended, spot-cleaned, hemmed. She was the only one of us who never sent her laundry home. Sometimes, when she wasn't studying, she sewed for herself, using accomplished small stitches, and there were no cut corners or loose threads.

“I learned to sew in the convent; all of us could sew like demons by the time we got out,” she said. “Kept the sisters in altar cloths, we did.”

Cecie's parents had died in an automobile wreck when she was very small, along with an older brother; she did not remember them. A grandmother and a trio of spinster aunts had raised her
in the big old family homeplace by the water, on the Eastern Shore. They were tiny, cultivated, devout Catholics who taught her music and sewing and what she called Advanced Ladyhood, and sent her to convent school when she was barely nine. They protected and adored her, if at a gentle remove, and the nuns had not been able to outwit or repress her, and it had been a good childhood, if an unworldly and rather lonely one. Her family was rich in culture and affection and antecedents but poor as church mice materially. They could barely send her out of state to school, even with the scholarships and the financial aid. Cecie, who planned to go on to law school after her graduation, knew it was up to her to make their investment work and get herself through Duke Law. Genteel poverty was one reason we knew each other down to the bottoms of our souls when we first met. As money calls out to money, so does the lack of it cry aloud to its own. It was the first of the great bonds between us.

The second was our utter lack of knowledge of what constituted reality. Cecie was pragmatic and tough in her self-discipline, but she was, in her microcosmic world born of loneliness and the company of naive, genteel old women and nuns, a match for me in all respects. Neither of us could have identified “real Life” when we met it, but it was perhaps less a handicap then than it would be today. Few young women of the late Fifties knew much about real life. “Get real” were words most of us had never heard, from our parents or anyone else. Cecie and I devoted the three years left to us at Randolph to the strict avoidance of real life, and succeeded gloriously. Sometimes I think I was the worst thing that could have happened to Cecie Hart. I was running from life, and something deep in her ardent soul was, even then and without her knowledge or permission, running toward it. I have to wonder, now, if I had not been there, whether Cecie might have met it earlier and with happier results. But I was there, and on the November day that she tossed her clothes into my room the great
friendship of my life was born, and in a way, though neither of us ever named it, the great love.