The Invention of Wings (18 page)

Then, one day in January, I noticed my father and older brothers huddled in the library with the door agape. The first icing of the winter had come in the night and glazed the city, and Tomfry had set the fireplaces ablaze. From where I stood in the main passage, I could see Father rubbing his hands before the flames, while Thomas, John, and Frederick gestured and flitted like moths in the light around his shoulders. Frederick, who’d recently returned from Yale and followed Thomas to the bar, slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “How dare they, how
dare
they!”

“We’ll mount a defense,” Thomas said. “You mustn’t worry, Father, we won’t be defeated, I promise you that.”

Someone had wronged Father?
I drew as close to the door as I dared, but I could make little sense of the discussion. They spoke of an outrage, but didn’t name it. They vowed a defense, but against what? Through the gap in the door, I watched them move to the desk, where they closed ranks around a document. They pointed at various passages, jabbing it with their fingers, debating in low, purposeful tones. The sight of them roused my ravenous old hunger to take my place in the world, too, to have my part matter. How many years had elapsed since I threw away the silver button?

I moved from the door, suddenly flush with anger. I was sorry for Father. He’d been wronged in some way, but here they all were ready to move heaven and earth to right it, and their wives, their mother, their sisters had no rights, not even to their own children. We couldn’t vote or testify in a court, or make a will—of course we couldn’t, we owned nothing to leave behind! Why didn’t the Grimké men assemble in
our
defense?

My anger dissipated, but my ignorance went on for another week. During those interminable days, Mother stayed in her chamber with a headache and even Thomas refused my queries, saying it was Father’s matter to disclose, not his. As it turned out, I would learn the news at a parlor concert held at one of the plantations northwest of the city.

Mary and I arrived on the plantation as the afternoon turned gray with twilight, our carriage met by a bevy of peacocks that strolled about the grounds for no reason other than ornamentation. They created a beautiful blue shimmer in the fading light, but I found them a sad spectacle, the way they made little rushes at the air, going nowhere.

The concert was already under way when I reached the parlor door. Burke slipped from his seat and greeted me with unusual warmth. He looked dashing in his long cerise vest and silk suit. “I was worried you weren’t coming,” he whispered and led me quickly to the empty chair beside his. As I slipped off the emerald jacket that Handful had so wondrously crafted, he placed a letter upon my lap. I raised my brows to him as if to ask whether I should break the seal and read it while Miss Parodi and the harpsichord vied for the room. “Later,” he mouthed.

It was unconventional to pass a note in this manner, and my mind fretted throughout the program at what it might contain. When Mrs. Drayton, Thomas’ mother-in-law, played the final piece on the harp, we adjourned to the dining room where the table was spread with a Charlotte Russe dessert and a selection of French wines, brandy, and Madeira, of which I couldn’t partake for all my apprehension. Burke gulped a brandy, then maneuvered me toward the front door.

“… Where are we going?” I asked, unsure of the propriety.

“Let’s take a stroll.”

We stepped onto the porch beneath the palladium fanlight and gazed at the sky. It was purple, almost watery-looking. The moon was rising over the tree line. I couldn’t, however, think of anything but the letter. I pulled it from my purse and ripped the seal.

My Dearest Darling,

I beg the privilege of becoming your most attached and devoted fiancé. My heart is yours.

I await your answer.

Burke

I read it once, then again, mildly disoriented, as if the letter he’d slipped to me earlier had been swapped for this one that had nothing at all to do with me. He seemed entertained by my confusion. He said, “Your parents will want you to wait and give your answer after you’ve consulted with them.”

“I accept your proposal,” I said, smiling at him, overwhelmed with a queer mixture of jubilation and relief. I would be married! I would not end up like Aunt Amelia Jane.

He was right, though, Mother would be horrified I’d answered without her say-so, but I didn’t doubt my parents’ response. After swallowing their disapproval, they would seize upon the miracle of Burke Williams’ proposal like it was the cure for a dread disease.

We walked along the carriage way, my arm looped in his. A little tremor was running rib to rib to rib inside of me. Abruptly, he steered me off the path toward a camellia grove. We disappeared into the shadows that hung in swaths between the huge, flowering bushes, and without preamble, he kissed me full on the mouth. I reared back. “… Why … why, you surprise me.”

“My Love, we’re engaged now, such liberties are allowed.”

He drew me to him and kissed me again. His fingers moved along the edge of my décolletage, brushing my skin. I didn’t entirely surrender, but I allowed Burke Williams a great amount of freedom during that small peccadillo in the camellia grove. When I mustered myself finally, pulling from his embrace, he said he hoped I didn’t hold his ardor against him. I did not. I adjusted my dress. I tucked vagrant pieces of hair back into my upswept coif.
Such liberties are allowed now.

As we walked back to the house, I fixed my eyes on the path, how it was riddled with peacock excrement and pebbles shining in the moon’s light. This marriage, it would be life-enough, wouldn’t it? Surely. Burke was speaking about the necessity of a long engagement. A year, he said.

As we drew near the porch, a horse whinnied, and then a man stepped from the front door and lit his pipe. It was Mr. Drayton, Thomas’ father-in-law.

“Sarah?” he said. “Is that you?” His eyes shifted to Burke and back to me. A lock of my hair fluttered guiltily at my shoulder. “Where’ve you been?” I heard the reproof, the alarm. “Are you all right?”

“… I am … we are engaged.” My parents weren’t yet informed, and I’d heralded the news to Mr. Drayton, whom I barely knew, hoping it would excuse whatever his mind imagined we were doing out there.

“We took a quick turn in the night air,” Burke said, trying, it seemed, to bring some normalcy to the moment.

Mr. Drayton was no fool. He gazed at me, plain Sarah, returning from a “turn in the night” with a startlingly handsome man, looking flushed and slightly unkempt. “Well, then, congratulations. Your happiness must be a welcome respite for your family given this recent trouble of your father’s.”

Was Father’s trouble common knowledge, then?

“Has some misfortune fallen upon Judge Grimké?” Burke asked.

“Sarah hasn’t told you?”

“… I suppose I’ve been too distressed to speak of it,” I said. “… But please, sir, inform him on my behalf. It would be a service to me.”

Mr. Drayton took a draught from his pipe and blew the spicy smoke into the night. “I regret to say the judge’s enemies seek to remove him from the court. Impeachment charges have been brought.”

I let my breath out. I couldn’t imagine a greater humiliation for our father.

“On what grounds?” Burke asked, properly outraged.

“They say he has grown biased and overly righteous in his judgments.” He hesitated. “They charge incompetence. Ah, but it is all politics.” He waved his hand dismissively, and I watched the bowl of his pipe flare in the small wind.

Any flicker of gladness I might’ve hoped for from my family about my engagement, any retribution I might’ve feared for accepting the proposal without permission, was swallowed by Father’s trial. Mother’s reaction to my announcement was simply, “Well done, Sarah,” as if reviewing one of my embroidery samplers. Father did not respond at all.

Throughout the winter, he sequestered in the library day and night with Thomas, Frederick, and Mr. Daniel Huger, a lawyer friend of Father’s who was known for legally eviscerating his opponents. My hearing was almost preternatural, cultivated by years of unsanctioned listening, and I caught scraps of conversation while sitting at the card table in the main passage, pretending to read.

John, you’ve received no money, no favors. You are accused of nothing that rises to the level of high crimes.

Isn’t a charge of incompetence bad enough? They accuse me of being biased! The streets and the papers are full of it. I’m ruined, regardless.

Father, you have friends in the legislative chamber!

Don’t be a fool, Thomas, what I have are enemies. Scheming bastards from the upcountry, seeking the bench for themselves.

They cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority.

Make meat of them, Daniel, do you hear me? Feed them to the dogs.

When the trial was heard that spring in the House of Representatives in Columbia, Mr. Huger assailed Father’s enemies with a vengeance, laying bare their political conniving with such force Father was acquitted in a single day, but the vote was ominously close, and he returned to Charleston, vindicated, but dirtied.

At fifty-nine, Father was suddenly a very old man. His face had turned haggard and his clothes baggy as if he’d wilted inside them. A tremor appeared in his right hand.

As the months passed, Burke paid courting calls to me weekly in the withdrawing room, where we were allowed unchaperoned visits. He filled these rendezvous with the same fever and excess we’d shared in the camellia grove, and I complied, drawing lines the best I could. I counted it God’s miracle we weren’t discovered, though I’m sure our invisibility was not due to God, but to the family’s distraction. Father continued to shuffle and shrivel and tuck his hand in his pocket to hide its shake. He turned into a recluse of a man. And I, I turned into a Jezebel of a woman.

M
auma couldn’t sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual. She didn’t know the meaning of the words
quiet as a mouse.
I was laying in the straw bed we’d always slept in, wondering what was on her mind this time. I’d stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah’s room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and nobody said a word about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was hit and miss.

Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she sat there and studied it.

Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story quilt. She’d been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than two years. “If there a fire and I ain’t here, that’s what you get,” she’d say. “You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my bones.”

I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she’d finished, but she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.

The day before, she’d told me, “You wait. I’m ’bout ready to roll down the frame and start quilting it all together.”

She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she’d dragged from the storeroom in the basement. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside we’d found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.

Last time I’d counted, she’d saved up four hundred dollars even.

Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.

I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark and stare up at a hole in the wall?”

“It’s something to do. Go on back to sleep.”

Go back to sleep—that was a lot of useless.

“Where do you keep the key to the chest?”

“Is that how
you
gon be? Lay there figurin’ how to peek at my quilt? The key hid on the back of nowhere.”