Low Country (30 page)

band in a pretty eighteenth-century bedroom that was

not mine, with breakfast made by someone else waiting

for us when we chose to come down. We slept late,

ate heartily of shrimp and grits and oysters in every

imaginable style and creamed seafood in patty shells

and crab cakes according to the receipts of a dozen

Charleston grandmothers, and we danced, and we

even sang a little when someone played a piano in the

late evenings or with the car radio, riding home on the

black, deserted roads, with the cold Christmas moon

silvering the marshes alongside us. I had not heard

Clay sing since we were young marrieds; it simply did

not seem to occur to him. He smiled often, now, and

laughed outright more than he had in what seemed to

me years. Whenever I glanced over at him, at a party

or on one of the moon-flooded drives home, I caught

him looking at me with something in his eyes that had

not been there in a long time.

I never wanted those suspended days to end.

On impulse we spent Christmas in Key West, meet-

ing Carter there when he came in from Puerto Rico,

and it was an eccentric, sweet, indolent time. I had a

heady, sweetheart-of-the-regiment feeling the entire

three days, with the two tall blond men on either side

of me everywhere I went, and the hot sun beating

down on my bare head and shoulders. It was strange

and funky and so tropical as to be safe, for there was

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no shard of Christmases past to sting and cut me. For

the past five years, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

had been dead times for me. But this one was raffish,

excessive, and totally alive. I thought that this would

be what we must do each year from now on, though

the thought of future Christmases seemed entirely un-

real to me.

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s we

went to a party at Hayes and Lucy’s house on Church

Street. It had been Hayes’s notion to invite his oldest

friends, those who had grown up with him and gone

to Virginia with him and Clay, and so we were surroun-

ded with many of the people I had first met even before

Clay and I married, the handful of couples who had

been my first real “crowd,” and who had remained so

until our children started to come and we moved away

from one another. Almost everybody came, for every-

one loves to visit Charleston, and Hayes had taken a

block of rooms at a nearby inn and footed the bill as

his Christmas present to his guests. If I wondered how

on earth he could afford it, I did not wonder long.

Hayes’s finances belonged outside the bubble. Inside

there was only room for the funny, lost young Hayes

who had brought Clay to me on a hot summer day,

out of a blinding glitter of dying sunlight.

Hayes and Lucy’s house is one of the big old

Charleston double houses, which means that it is

Low Country / 267

two rooms wide instead of one, and very long. Its up-

stairs and downstairs piazzas were hung with garlands

of smilax and holly, and tinsel and tiny white Christ-

mas lights studded the crape myrtle trees and the lower

branches of the live oaks that hung over the garden.

It was a crisp night, too chilly to be outside, but we

went out at midnight to sing carols, and the sound of

our whiskey-sweet voices climbing into the night sky

over the old vine-covered back garden walls of Church

Street, and the clouds of frosty breath on which the

songs floated, and the yellow flames of candlelight

from neighboring windows all made that night as en-

chanted as if it had fallen in Avalon. I stood in a circle

with these people who had been my first friends as a

married woman, who had been young with me, our

arms around one another’s waists and shoulders, and

thought that if I should have to die suddenly, I would

not be sorry if it was on a night like this. It was a se-

ductive enough thought to frighten me, and I went

back into the house and asked Hayes for another old-

fashioned. Looking back, I see that I drank a lot in

those days of the bubble, but it was not as it was in

other times. I never seemed to get tipsy at all.

We stayed over with Hayes and Lucy that night, and

made hilarious and silent love in their high-ceilinged

old guest room, under an embroidered coverlet that

had come, Lucy said, with one

268 / Anne Rivers Siddons

of her forebears from England in the time of the Lord

Proprietors. I think, though, that she exaggerated; Clay

and I gave the coverlet a rather muscular workout and

it was still intact in all its silky shabbiness in the

morning. We laughed a great deal that night, silently,

with our hands over our mouths, for our bedroom was

just down the hall from Hayes and Lucy’s, and neither

of us felt like listening to Hayes’s sly insinuations at

breakfast. It was very late when we finally lay still and

sliding toward sleep, and Clay said, “I wish this night

would never end.”

I traced my finger along his bare chest. It was slick

with cooling sweat.

“I do, too,” I said, feeling tears prick my eyes and

blinking them back. “Oh, I do, too.”

In all that spangled and fragile country there was

one place that I could not go, and that was to the

house on the island. I did not even try. I was afraid,

and knew it clearly, and knew what I feared: both that

in the long, still nights I would hear the laughter and

voice of my dead child, and that I would not. The mere

thought of sitting alone all night in that darkened living

room overlooking the creek—for I knew that I would

not sleep—made me break out in a cold sweat at my

hairline. One way or another, the island house was

haunted for me now.

Oh, I could go in the daytime for a little while, and

did once or twice, but soon I stopped

Low Country / 269

even that. The winter dark came down too soon. The

silence that I had so loved waited too breathlessly for

sounds that could not come…or could, and bring

madness with them. I knew this notion of mine was

not rational. I would, I resolved, deal with it as I could

with all the other things that bumped like sharks at the

aquarium wall of my bubble, after the holidays. But I

missed the island, and I found that I missed the ponies

and Lita and even Luis Cassells in some unexplored

way. So I filled the days that remained to me inside

the bubble with activity, from first light to long after

dark. I polished silver, washed windows, cleaned out

long-neglected closets, took curtains and drapes to be

cleaned, attacked the neglected winter garden with a

vengeance. It pleased and soothed me, somehow, to

feel with my fingers the lares and penates of my mar-

riage and my life with Clay, to tend them, to put them

away renewed and shining. I sang as I tended and

counted my treasures.

One morning toward New Year’s I was preparing

to leave the nursery with a trunkful of new rose cuttings

and ran into Luis Cassells. It was a raw day, with wisps

of the morning’s fog still curling among the ocean pines

and clinging in heavy droplets to the moss, and he

wore a hooded sweatshirt and thick-soled boots caked

with the black mud of the marsh. He had two enorm-

ous sacks of fertilizer in his big arms, and

270 / Anne Rivers Siddons

he grinned around them when he saw me.

“Miz Mengele!” he yelled across the parking lot.

“Happy holidays to you and yours!”

Heads turned toward me, and my face reddened. I

could feel it. At the same time I felt the corners of my

mouth tug upward, and a laugh start low in my throat.

He was outrageous and incorrigible, and I had missed

him.

“And to you and yours,” I called back, and went over

to the Peacock Plantation pickup truck, where he was

storing the fertilizer. “Have you had a good Christ-

mas?”

“You ask a Jew that?” He laughed. “Oh, hell, what

chance does a poor lone Jew have down here? We had

an old-fashioned Dayclear Christmas, and that, my

lady, is some kind of Christmas indeed. A combination

of Southern Baptist and Kwanza and Hanukkah, with

a little Anglican and Disneyland thrown in. We cooked

and ate for three days, and went to a Christmas Eve

watch service and shouted and sang until dawn, and

Ezra cooked a wild turkey somebody shot illegally and

gave him, and Auntie Tuesday made hoppin’ John and

cooked seven thousand pounds of yams, and I made

black beans and rice to go with it, and Sophia ordered

bagels and lox from the H&H deli in New York for

Christmas breakfast, and Lita and Mark threw up three

times apiece on Christmas Day. It was totally satisfact-

ory.”

Low Country / 271

I lifted my eyebrows.

“Sophia and Mark?”

He grinned; with only his face showing under the

tight-drawn hood, I thought that he looked like a

werewolf.

“Well, nobody else asked her for Christmas. Ezra

thought it was the only neighborly thing to do.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said, aghast. “I thought surely she’d

be going back to New York for the holidays. I should

have checked; it’s sort of my job to see that all the of-

fice crowd has somewhere to go for holidays. I just

got busy, and then we went to Key West…I’ll call her

this morning and apologize.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “Looked to me like she

had a great time. Oh, she showed up in some kind of

suede jumpsuit thing and high-heeled boots that cost

more than Auntie’s house, and she still isn’t used to

brushing a chicken off wherever she wants to sit down,

but she’s learning. She’s learning. She makes careful

notes on everything that happens in her little leather

Day-Timer, and she’s about to run everybody crazy

with that tape recorder and camera, and she still talks

about ‘the Gullah experience’ and ‘the oral tradition’

and a pile of shit nobody can understand, but she’s

Ezra’s guest and they’re getting used to her, and

nobody gets ruffled up about her much anymore. And

they love the little boy. He

272 / Anne Rivers Siddons

used to cry whenever somebody touched him, and it

took him four or five visits to start talking, but he’s

jabbering a blue streak now. Lita has taken him under

her wing. In another month they’ll both be little Gullah

younguns.”

“Four or five visits…she goes over there often then,”

I said. Somehow I simply could not see it, remote, el-

egant Sophia Bridges spending her days in the hard-

scrabble clutter and the warm, smoky funk of Dayclear.

“She’s come almost every day,” Luis said. “She’s

taking her assignment from Mengele very seriously,

whatever it is. She says only that she’s studying the

culture under his auspices and with his blessings. I

don’t ask her anymore what she aims to do with her

newfound knowledge, or what he does. You’ll notice

I’m not asking you, either.”

“I really don’t know,” I said, feeling the walls of the

bubble quiver perilously. “And I’m not going to ask

Clay. You know what I told you, about them coming

up with a better plan…for everything. I’m sure Sophia’s

research is part of that, but beyond that I just—”

“—don’t know,” he finished for me. “Ah, yes. Well.

Come and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me

what you do know. I promise not to ask you anything

else about the island except why you haven’t been over

there lately. We’ve been looking for you almost every

day. Lita is

Low Country / 273

driving me crazy about the ponies, but I’m not going

to take her to see them without you along, and besides,

I haven’t seen them or their calling cards for a while.”

I hesitated, but then I went with him to the chic little

coffee shop on the traffic circle nearby. We took our

cups to a corner table and he pulled the hood off his

big head and was the Luis Cassells I knew again, half

mythic creature and half lowland gorilla. His hours in

the winter sun had kept him walnut brown, and his

teeth flashed piratically in the dimness of the little shop.

I saw a face I knew at a table across the room and

sighed. Shawna would be in Clay’s office within the

hour, smiling archly and twittering about seeing me

having a little coffee date with the hired help. I did not

care if Clay knew, but I hated the smirk on Shawna’s

proprietary face and hoped devoutly that Hayes was

not around when she told Clay.

“So why haven’t we seen you?” he said matter-of-

factly. “What’s the matter?”

“Why does something have to be the matter?” I said,

annoyed. “I’ve just been busy. Christmas is always a

zoo down here, and then we went to Key West over

Christmas Eve and Day, and there have been a bunch

of parties in Charleston.…”

“Ah, I forgot. Miz Mengele is a social lioness. Of