Islands (18 page)

Come to that, none of ours did either, not really. Lewis’s two daughters were both married, with children. They had fled California and their mother, and settled on Long Island and in Connecticut respectively, and went in the summers to Europe or the Caribbean or Point O’ Woods. They called dutifully, and once or twice we saw them when Lewis or I had business in New York, for lunches with the grandchildren at the Russian Tea Room, or dinners somewhere stark and chic that the twins picked. They had brought the grandchildren to Edisto once while they sailed in the Greek isles, and the children sulked and sighed loudly, and refused to go out into the heat of the Low Country, preferring to watch television. They were unmoved by the ospreys and eagles and herons and wood storks, and refused even to accompany their grandfather to the wondrous baby alligator nursery. The bobcat, I supposed, had long ago gone to some black-water hummock in the sky, but on certain still nights when the river was silent except for the lazy slap against the pilings of the dock, and no moon rode the sky, we both heard, or thought we did, the faint rustle of spartina grass at the foot of the dock, and the slap-thud of heavy paws. The children did not come out to listen. The summer that they were with us, the Perseid meteor shower was closer and more spectacular than we could remember, extravagant fireworks in the sky, but the aggrieved children were glued to the hard-rock channel on cable, mourning the malls of Long Island and Connecticut. We were both exhausted and delighted when we decanted them from the ancient Range Rover at the Charleston airport.

“Truly the spawn of their grandmother,” Lewis said. The children did not visit again.

Henry and Fairlie did spend a lot of time with their daughter, Nancy, and her brood of tall, skinny red-blond children. They were as gangling and sweet tempered as Henry and as quicksilver as Fairlie, and we all enjoyed them when they came out to the beach house. But they, too, had their own enclave at Wild Dunes, and Fairlie and Henry saw them mostly there or in Bedon’s Alley.

“I wish they had a place like this to run wild in,” Henry said to us when he and Fairlie had come out to Edisto the last weekend of the year and the century. “They’re going to grow up with no sense at all of the plantation life that all their people before them lived. They already think a plantation is a place with guides in costumes, that you have to pay to get into.”

“I always thought you’d maybe buy a place out here or somewhere after your island place went with Hugo,” Lewis said. “I remember that for a while you were talking about it. It’s surely not too late. The Crunches are putting Red Wing on the market. I think Lila’s handling it. We’d be neighbors.”

There was an odd silence. Henry shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at a stump. Fairlie looked off down the river.

“It just never seemed the right time,” Henry said finally. “Listen, there’s something—”

“I need to get back to town,” Fairlie said abruptly. “The center has a new mare coming in from Aiken. I want to get a look at her.”

She turned and started back to their truck. Henry looked at us helplessly, then shrugged and turned and followed her. “See you guys New Year’s,” he said over his shoulder. Lewis and I stared after them. I thought they had planned to stay for lunch.

I told Camilla about the little scene when I went up to have lunch with her the next day.

“He had something he wanted to say to us,” I said. “But she just cut him off.”

She looked out over the water.

“She’s a force of nature,” she said. “He could no more stand up to her for very long than he could to a category-five hurricane.”

“You think there’s something on Fairlie’s mind that she doesn’t want us to know?”

“Has been, for a long time. She’s been downright distant. Usually you can’t stop her talking.”

And she had, now that I thought of it. Distant and even more restless than usual.

“Well, at least Henry seems pretty much the same,” I said worriedly. “Or he did until yesterday.”

“Bless his dearest heart,” Camilla said, smiling. “It takes a lot to ruffle Henry. She can do it, though. I always wondered, in a way, why he married her, aside from the fact that he’s crazy about her, of course. Henry needs a safe, sheltered harbor more than anybody else I know. He hasn’t had a whole lot of that with Fairlie. Of course, he’d never say so, but I’ve known him all my life. I know when he needs his home port.”

I had never thought of Henry as someone who needed an anchor, or a sheltered harbor. He went fearlessly and with relish into places few other men would go. But still, she was right; she had known him since kindergarten, at Miss Hanahan’s Little School behind her home on Church Street.

“All of a sudden it feels like almost everybody I know is…somebody I don’t know,” I said unhappily. “I wish I knew what was going on with us.”

“It’s not all of us,” she said, pouring me a last cup of the fragrant oolong that she knew I loved. “It’s just some of us. Maybe we’ll find out New Year’s Eve. No better time to open people up. Don’t fret, Anny. It will take more than a couple of burrs under our saddles to change us in any important way.”

She got up to pull the drapes across the French doors to the terrace, where the dull glitter of low winter light on the water was blinding. I got up and went back downstairs to my office for the last time in the only century I knew.

7

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, New Year’s Eve, 1999, I got up early and went over to the Queens Hospital Wellness Center to do my stint on the treadmill and the weights. I tried to do it every time we stayed in town, which we’d done the night before because we were going out to the beach house around midafternoon. But I’d never liked it, and only did it because Lewis insisted, and it did make me feel better.

Henry did it religiously most mornings when he was in town, and relished it. For one thing, it kept his body compact and trim, and for another, it was the hands-down favorite unofficial social club of the downtown community—the men, anyway. They all knew each other, and were easy in the knowing, not caring a whit about sagging stomachs or softening biceps. I envied them both the effortless companionship and the careless acceptance of their bodies.

For myself, I had no corresponding network of exercise buddies, largely because I got there earlier than most women did, and was glad of that. I hated the idea of jiggling and huffing and sweating under the eyes of anybody else, most especially the sleek women who came to the center on their way to lunch or committee meetings, carrying their street clothes in Saks bags. So I came early, muffled in sweats, and sought out the farthest treadmill in the room, and the weight bench farthest from the mirrored wall. Usually I had my corner of the gym to myself, but today there was someone striding vigorously on the elliptical trainer next to my favorite treadmill. Before I could sidle away, a high female voice cried, “Mrs. Aiken! Anny! Happy New Year!”

Oh, shit, I thought. Bunny Burford. Just exactly the note I want to end the century on.

Bunny was a legend in the downtown medical community. Once, when I first knew her, I called her an icon, and Lewis grimaced and said, “An iceberg would be more like it.”

“But she’s always giggling and trilling and hugging,” I said. “I don’t see any ice in that.”

“That’s because the real Bunny Burford is submerged so deep very few people ever see her. But way down there she’s cold as steel and twice as hard. If you don’t know how to handle her, she can be damned dangerous. Don’t ever tell her anything personal, Anny. She won’t forget it, and she’ll find a way to use it.”

“Then how did she get to be deputy administrator of Queens? Seems to me you’d have to have something more going for you than spite and ambition.”

“Oh, she does. She’s smart as a whip, and she runs a tighter ship than Charlie ever did. She was his secretary when he first came to the hospital, and she made herself more and more indispensable, until she really could run it almost as well as he could. Trouble was, not many of our big supporters liked her, and the staff certainly didn’t. She was merciless to the nurses. Henry always thought she wanted to be a doctor, and made her position at Queens into the next-best thing. Her authority is almost unassailable. It would take someone years to learn as much about the hospital and the people there as Bunny knows. She fancies herself a sort of social hostess, too. She shows up at every party and fund-raiser and seminar as though she were an ordained part of it, and smiles and flatters and listens raptly until whoever’s being courted is floating ten feet off the floor. In that sense, she is a good fund-raiser. It’s one of the reasons nobody wants to challenge her.”

“And the other reasons?”

“Well, like I said, she knows an awful lot about an awful lot of people. I don’t know if she’s ever used any of it or not, though I’ve heard she has, but everybody knows she could. Now
that’s
power.”

“She sounds awful,” I said. “I don’t see how an…an outlander could just come into Queens and get herself an inside track like that.”

“Well,” he said, “for one thing she’s not exactly an outlander. She grew up on Church Street and went to Miss Hanahan’s Little School along with most of us, and her brains got her a scholarship to Ashley Hall with a lot of the girls. I don’t imagine she was ever really part of all that…she went to the Little School because her mother was a teacher’s helper there, and they lived on Church dependent on somebody or other in exchange for her mother’s doing the cleaning. I don’t know where or if she went to college; I think I heard business school. I know she wasn’t around Charleston for a while. And then, just after Charlie came in to take over, she appeared in his office and asked to be his secretary, and she was so smooth and assured and obviously smart, and she asked for so little money, that he hired her on the spot. You know Charlie…he was never a detail man. He was more than glad to have somebody competent to handle all that. And she was very, very competent. Good looking, too. That didn’t hurt.”

“Good looking?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Bunny’s towering, blocklike figure and nearly vermilion hair, piled high in a lacquered coil that looked as if a mortar shell could not dent it. Her eyes were pale blue and narrow, and her mouth was large and lipsticked to the same shade as her hair, and all her features seemed to sit in the middle of her face, as in a child’s drawing. She seemed absolutely impenetrable. She did have pretty skin, though, taut and pink and white, and virtually unlined. I wondered if the rest of Bunny, beneath the tailored Talbot suits she wore, was as smooth and soft and dewy. It was a bizarre notion.

“She was good looking, in a kind of Amazonian way,” Lewis said. “She was tall, with a little waist and those incredible boobs and hips, and her hair was almost as red as Fairlie’s, and she wore it in a long pageboy. And she always wore thick red lipstick that made her look like she’d just eaten a raccoon or something. She always seemed to me like Stupefyin’ Jones in
Li’l Abner
. Oh, yeah. She cut quite a swath for a while. Charlie dated her some when he first came.”

“What happened with that?” I asked.

“Camilla,” he said. “There was no contest there.”

So on this last morning of the last century in the millennium, I flinched as if I had been bitten by a blackfly, and said, “Hi, Bunny. You’re up and at it early this morning.”

She wore a neon-pink velour top and pants, and her astonishing bosom jutted shelflike and absolutely immobile in front of her as she strode on the elliptical trainer. It was hard not to stare at it. She wore matching pink pom-poms on her white exercise shoes.

“I’ve got plans for later,” she said coyly. “I need to get started early. What about you all? Aren’t the Scrubs going somewhere exotic like Hawaii or the Riviera to see the millennium out?”

I thought that her notions of exotic did not exactly coincide with mine, and I hated the familiarity of “the Scrubs” on her lips. Nobody else I knew but Bunny ever called us that, except us.

“Exotic in the extreme,” I said. “Sullivan’s Island, to be exact.”

“Oh, yes, Camilla’s beach house. It must really be something special; I heard enough about it from Charlie over the years. I’ve never seen it. We always went to the Isle of Palms.”

I did not know who “we” was, and did not ask.

“Well, it’s not very special, I’m afraid, except to us. It’s practically falling apart. We all own it equally with Camilla now.”

I was immediately sorry I had told her that; it was no one’s business but ours. But something about the way “Camilla” also sounded on her lips put my back up; a sly sort of familiarity, maybe. I knew that Camilla would probably not even remember who Bunny Burford was.

She smiled broadly, her cheeks bunching up into tight little apples, and said, “How convenient for Camilla. Well, she always did know how to get what she wanted, even in kindergarten. I can remember her just standing and staring at a ball I was playing with, smiling and smiling, until I gave it to her. I never saw that smile fail. I’m surprised she hasn’t smiled somebody else into taking care of her since Charlie died.”

I felt cold rage spread in my chest, but would not give her the satisfaction of showing it.

“Camilla hardly needs taking care of,” I said. “She usually takes care of us.”

“Bet she does,” Bunny said, grinning fiercely. “Well, have the Scrubs got all their supplies laid in?”

“Supplies?”

“For Y2K,” she said as if to a backward child. “You know, water and food and kerosene for heating and cooking. Toilet paper, toothpaste. If the bridges go out, you all could be stuck over there for weeks.”

“Sounds wonderful,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to do that. What about you? Have you battened down?”

“Oh, yes,” she said complacently. “My friend and I have reservations at a lovely hotel in Asheville, and my car is already packed with everything you could possibly need for a long siege. My friend is even bringing his gun.”

“
Gun?
” I had a crazy image of Bunny stalking through the woods in all her massive pink fuzziness, gun at the ready in case some woodland creature was unlucky enough to show itself.

“We don’t anticipate needing it,” she said. “The hotel is very secure, and it’s a lot easier to defend yourself in the mountains. But we feel safer just having it. You never know who might break into your room in a power outage.”

True, I thought. It’s undoubtedly open season on room service waiters.

Aloud I said, “Well, good luck to you, Bunny. I hope you don’t have to use any of that stuff. And have a happy new whatever.”

“The same to you,” she said as I got off the treadmill and started for the shower. I wanted to get in and out and dressed again before she came into the locker room. Bunny Burford naked and pink and dripping was more than I could handle. I turned away so she could not see the laughter starting in my eyes.

“You all get your supplies in, you hear?” she called after me. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

“Right,” I called back over my shoulder. “I’m just on my way to pick up sandbags now.”

Before I got to the locker room I heard her say, “Sandbags?” in a worried voice. I was in the shower with the water roaring down on me before I allowed myself laughter.

In the car on our way over to the island, I told Lewis about my encounter with Bunny.

“She’s even more awful than I thought she was,” I said. “She actually implied that Camilla schemes and manipulates all the time, to get what she wants. I think Camilla took her ball in kindergarten, or something. Anyway, she’s never forgotten it.”

“She wouldn’t,” Lewis grinned. “Camilla is everything Bunny isn’t, and won’t ever be. By the way, did you know her name was Bernice, not Bunny? At any rate, she’s had a thing about Camilla ever since Charlie met her. Thinks Camilla stole him from her. I’ve never heard her say anything, but some of the nurses have, and it gets around. Nobody pays any attention to her.”

“I hope it never gets back to Camilla.”

“Why? She’d laugh her ass off. You know nothing much ever bothers Cam. Who’s the friend she’s taking to the mountains?”

“I don’t know, but he’s packing a gun.”

He winced. “So would I, if Bunny was my friend. What kind of supplies do you think they’re taking?”

“Oh, you know. Bottled water. Toilet paper. Dress shields.”

“Bad girl,” he said, grinning.

The sky was lowering when we reached the beach house, although the air was soft and there was a hint of some flowery fragrance in the air. Whether it was blooming on the island or borne in from far away on the tide, I could not tell. Except for Camilla’s old gray Mercedes, ours was the only car in the sandy parking space. There was an aluminum ramp now, up to the house, beside the steps. We had had it installed for Boy and Girl, who could no longer manage the stairs, and for Gladys.

“I use it sometimes, too,” Camilla said ruefully. “The four of us old crocks crawling up it must be something to see.”

We had all laughed. Camilla might be badly stooped now, but she was so ethereally lovely in her sixties that the word “crock” could not possibly apply. I was sure that she knew that.

We got out of the Range Rover and unloaded the back. Tonight was to be the feast of all our feasts. We had brought sherried she-crab bisque from Linda Cousins’s kitchen, and both duck and quail, courtesy of Robert. I had bought some silken, hideously expensive truffled pâté from O’Hara & Flynn. Henry and Fairlie were bringing rare-as-black-pearls white asparagus, which we would have with a caviar mayonnaise. Lila had stuffed an imperial crown pork roast and Simms was bringing champagne of a vintage that the rest of us would have had to mortgage our homes for. Camilla was making the dessert. She would not tell us what it was to be. Even though we had hauled food up these stairs hundreds of times, it was hard not to be excited about tonight’s dinner. Everything about the day and the night had the breath-held air of anticipation about it.

The turn of a century, the turn of a millennium…portent was everywhere. All of a sudden, midway up the stairs, I shivered, as if a goose had walked over my grave. I stopped and looked back at Lewis.

“What?” he said.

“This millennium thing feels like some kind of juggernaut bearing down on us,” I said. “I don’t want to live in a new millennium. I haven’t used up the old one yet.”

“Go on up before I drop this, my little Luddite,” Lewis said. “When we’re ninety the
Post and Courier
will hail us as the only generation to see the year and the century
and
the millennium turn. We’ll be interviewed incessantly.”

“You wish.”

From the outset, the night was Camilla’s. She met us at the door virtually shimmering with excitement, thrumming with a kind of palpable radiance. I had seen her happy before, and laughing, and exhilarated, but I had never seen her like this. You could almost see the dancing particles of light around her, feel her exuberance. We both smiled, and then laughed. It was impossible not to.

“You look like somebody plugged you in,” Lewis said, kissing her on the cheek. “Share with the class.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, hugging us both hard. “All of a sudden I just thought how many years we’ve all been together here, and how I’ve loved it, and how I’ve loved you both, and everybody, and how glad I am that it’s never changed.”

An answering wave of love for her and us and the house and the island swept over me, and I hugged her back, and spun her around. I was shorter by five inches, but she was as light as a bird’s wing, as a winged seedling borne down on the wind from a chestnut tree.