The Last Original Wife

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Thank you, John,” Jonathan said.

  “Wanna dance?” I said and quietly hummed the opening bars of an oldie we all used to dance to in the seventies. Jonathan just shook his head. “Can you still shag?”

  For the uninformed, the shag—in Charleston and indeed all over the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia—is not a haircut or a sexual act. It is a dance, and shagging like a native is a passport to your southern authenticity. The shag is also the state dance of South Carolina.

  “Madam, you know that I can still cut a rug with the best of them.”

  “Maybe I’ll get to see that sometime.” I slipped into my chair, and Jonathan pushed it in for me.

  “Well, you may find this hard to believe, but there’s actually a shag club in Charleston and I go now and then, just to be sure I’m not getting rusty. When’s the last time you went dancing?”

  Dancing? I thought about it for a second and quickly decided that dancing between Wes and me was nothing more than an obligatory thing—a spin around the floor at a club dance or a wedding. We had not gone out for an evening of real dancing just for the fun of it since the children were born.

  “A long while,” I said.

  “Hmmm.” Jonathan was running down the extensive wine list while the sommelier stood by. He ordered a bottle of white wine and said, “We can start with white and depending on what you’d like to have for dinner, I can order some red too.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So? A long while, huh? Doesn’t Wes like to dance?”

  “Not really. He likes to play golf.”

  “I see.”

  The sommelier returned and opened our bottle. Jonathan tasted it and nodded for the pour.

  “A toast,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, “to what?”

  “More dancing!”

  “To more dancing!”

  Over a dinner of frisée salads with perfectly poached farm eggs, a rack of lamb with fingerling potatoes and minted peas, and finally pecan pie with some concoction of a ginger whip, I laid out my marriage for Jonathan. He listened like a good friend would, stopped me now and then to ask a question, and nodded when he agreed. And I told him about the money, which pretty much sent his eyebrows to the ceiling.

  “So that’s where it is, and those are all the reasons I’m here,” I said at last. “What would you do?”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure. I have to give this some thought. But I know one thing for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t like seeing you in this conundrum. A gorgeous woman like you ought to be a lot happier than you are.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Lonely Wes

  I took myself out to the golf club almost every night. Les’s Martha couldn’t cook anything except red beans and rice and chicken with enough garlic to kill you. Apparently, the people in wherever she came from never heard of plain string beans or steamed spinach or God, I don’t know, but I couldn’t take her cooking anymore. I mean, Les was no four-star chef, but at least her cooking didn’t fight me all night long. Suddenly I was living on antacids and longing for salad from a bag with lemon juice and olive oil, the way Les always fixed it.

  So, as I was saying, I was at the club in the grill room studying the menu and who walks in? Cornelia!

  “Hi, Wes!” she said. I stood and she gave me a peck on the cheek. “Sit! Sit!”

  I continued to stand. “Well, good evening, Mrs. Stovall! Where’s Harold?”

  “Oh, he’s home in a funk and I figured you might be here.”

  What in the world? Trouble in paradise so soon?

  “Well, come join me! This eating alone business is getting old!”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.”

  I moved around the table to pull back a chair for her. “Don’t be ridiculous! Sit! Join me! I haven’t even ordered yet!”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .”

  “I’m positive.”

  She lowered herself into the chair with a practiced and singular hip-swiveling movement reminiscent of Hollywood bombshells from movies made in the 1930s. You know, it was like watching Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth swing their gorgeous haunches into a sports car without touching a thing. That Harold was some lucky dog.

  I took my seat again and snapped my napkin over my lap and motioned for the waiter to bring us another setup and menu.

  “Would you like a cocktail? I was just thinking about ordering a martini.”

  “You know what? Yeah! I’d love a martini.”

  “Vodka or gin?”

  “Vodka, dirty not filthy, straight up with two olives.”

  “That’s just how I like mine!”

  “Really? Wow! I had no idea!”

  So I ordered our two martinis, and they were there in almost under a minute and we touched the edges of our glasses. A speedy bartender is essential to a good club.

  “What are we toasting?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s drink to Thursday night! It’s still Thursday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am! It’s still Thursday. Here’s to it!”

  She drank half of it in one sip and I thought, Wow, young people must have cement guts or something.

  “That’s delicious!” she said.

  “Yeah, the guys here make a mean drink.” We were looking at the menus. “I’m thinking pork chops. How about you?”

  “Pork chops sound great,” she said. The waiter arrived and Cornelia looked up at him demurely. “Mr. Carter can order for me.” She smiled and handed her menu to him.

  Now, in the South and perhaps elsewhere, it was customary for a gentleman to order for a lady, but in the privacy of your own club? It seemed unnecessarily formal. I mean, Les knew all the waitstaff forever and they knew that she liked the Dover sole with the mustard sauce on the side. So if she said she felt like fish or how’s the fish, they took her order.

  “Well, it looks like we’re having pork chops,” I said. “Pink on the inside, but not rare.”

  “They will be perfectly done to your taste,” said Diego, who’d worked at the club longer than I could remember. “Would you like another?” He lifted Cornelia’s empty glass.

  “Why not?” she said.

  Why not, indeed? Maybe because you might roll out of your chair and pass out on the floor? But I wasn’t saying a word about it.

  “So what’s going on with Harold? Why’s he in a funk?”

  “Because, because . . . oh, Wes! Harold can’t . . . you know. . . . perform!”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Wes? Aren’t I too young to face the rest of my life with no more sex?”

  Aw, sweet Jesus! Did I really want to know this?

  “Um, sweetheart, that’s really none of my business, but you know . . . there are pills?” I was whispering because the last thing I wanted was to be overheard.

  “He can’t take them. They goof up his heart or something.”

  The pork chops arrived and I realized I was starving. We began to eat.

  “Wow. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “I mean, my whole marriage is just a mess. I broke up his marriage with Danette and she hates me, which is too bad because she’s really supposed to be a nice lady.”

  “She is. She’s great. So you feel bad about coming between them?”

  “Sort of. The wedding is going to be awkward as hell. But, I mean, I never put a gun to Harold’s head, you know.”

  “True.”

  “I’m not ever gonna get laid again and oh, Wes, don’t you have any advice for me?”

  I sat back and wiped my mouth. What could I say? “Honey, if I was that smart, Les would be sitting here right next to me.”

  “But, Wes? You’re the smartest man I’ve ever met. Surely, you can help me figure this out. Please?”

  She put her hand over mine and squeezed it and I thought, Oh, boy, this is way more than I bargained for.

  CHAPTER 13

  Les Infatuated


  The next morning I walked Miss JP to White Point Gardens and back, or maybe I should say we went together and, pardon the pun, stretched our dogs. At home we shared scrambled eggs and toast on the terrace in the fragrant and cool morning air. A good long stroll and breakfast had become our new habit, weather permitting. And Miss JP was such a good listener.

  “So, my little furry friend? What do you think I should do about Jonathan?”

  She looked at me and turned her head to one side. She seemed to be waiting for me to tell her more, as though how could she offer a worthy opinion when she didn’t have enough facts?

  “It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it? A woman my age running around with an old flame? Is that really ever going anywhere? Should I call my husband and see how he’s doing? No? You’re right. He’s probably at work, and we know he hates personal phone calls at work.”

  My relationship with Miss JP was evolving quickly. She looked at me intently then and stood on her hind legs, her front paws landing in my lap as if to say, Well, I don’t think you have to report in to that son of a gun anymore!

  I would have sworn that dog was smiling.

  “Come on back inside with me,” I said. “It’s time to get dressed, and I think today I’m going to exhume Josephine Pinckney’s past!”

  As Harlan suggested, I decided to knock on the door of the South Carolina Historical Society to see what they had in their collections that pertained to her life. I’d enjoyed Three O’Clock Dinner very much, but I wanted to put it in the context of her own life and time. All the things that were so shocking in her day—cross-dressing, lesbians, women smoking, infidelity—had become commonplace in mine. But I wondered, did she view them as commonplace in hers? She came of age in the Roaring Twenties, after all. But she was a founding member of the South Carolina Poetry Society. I couldn’t reconcile flappers reading Emily Dickinson. But the changing world around Jo Pinckney must have influenced her behavior because she wrote about infidelity with such authority. Harlan was right to say that she was a bit of a wild child, but I wanted to know it for myself.

  Karen Stokes, the researcher who answered the door, was extremely cordial and invited me to come in and have a seat at a table in any room as though I was an old friend coming for a visit to her house. She said she would gladly bring me a box of Josephine’s letters.

  “We only ask that you sign in here and pay a small fee . . .”

  I was happy to comply.

  “You have an interest in Josephine Pinckney?” she said.

  “Yes, sort of. I’m actually staying in her house across the street.”

  “At Harlan’s?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Oh! My goodness!” Karen said. “Well, we’re so happy to have you here! Harlan is just an amazing friend to the Historical Society.”

  “Harlan is amazing period. He’s the greatest brother in the world.”

  “I’ll bet. Wait! Look at your eyes! I see the family resemblance. Aren’t genes funny?”

  “Sometimes. Not always.”

  She stopped and looked at me, probably thinking about some crazy relative she’d been forced to endure out of a sense of duty. One that should’ve been locked in the attic but that very same one insisted on sitting on the front porch. In her nightgown. Harlan and I had a few of those. Didn’t most families? Well, Charlestonians did—it was all that lead that lined the old cisterns that made our grandmother’s generation batty.

  “Boy, are you ever right about that. Let’s get you settled.”

  I took a seat in one of the two-hundred-year-old rooms that were filled, from the heart pine floors to the sky-high plastered ceilings, with historical reference books on the old oak bookshelves. Over the next few hours, I shuffled through her correspondence with Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Alice B. Toklas. There were letters from Prentiss Taylor and Dorothy and DuBose Heyward and plenty of letters from her publishers over the years. But in terms of understanding who she was? I was getting nowhere. I got up to stretch, and Karen Stokes reappeared.

  “Can I bring you another box?” she asked.

  “No, I think I’m all done for today. I’m not really finding what I want.”

  “Well, tell me what you’re looking for, and maybe I can zero in on something.”

  “Well, you know Harlan. He’s consumed with all things historic, and he adores Josephine Pinckney.”

  “I know. I’ve met his dog.” She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled. “She’s the best-dressed dog in Charleston!”

  “I know. I’d kill for her pearls.” Then I giggled too. “Anyway, I’m trying to get a sense of who Jo Pinckney was, if she was satisfied with her success and why she sort of disappeared from the spotlight. I mean, I grew up here and never even heard of her.”

  “Ah!” Karen said. “Okay. Look, if you’re not here to do scholarly research to produce some new learned opinion on Josephine Pinckney’s life, you should read Barbara Bellows’s biography. She actually did all the scholarly research. It took her years! It will tell you plenty! Stay right here. I’ll get you a copy.”

  She slipped around the corner and came back with A Talent for Living. “Hold on to your hat,” she said, handing it to me. “Josephine had some life.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know, we usually don’t do this, but you can borrow it if you like, since you’re Harlan’s sister and all. Besides, it’s a contemporary book and we have about a dozen copies.”

  “Wow! Thanks! I’ll return it, I promise.”

  “Oh, you don’t exactly look like a flight risk to me. Anyway, Ms. Bellows spent years researching Josephine Pinckney, and I’d say her book is definitely the quintessential book to read to get a good, clear picture of Pinckney’s life.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Yep. Twice.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Well, I loved it.”

  “This is probably a stupid question, but has Harlan read it?” I began to flip through the opening pages.

  “Isn’t he thanked in the acknowledgments? I think she gave him his own paragraph. Toward the end?”

  She took the book back from me and pointed to Harlan’s name.

  “My brother! He’s something else, isn’t he?”

  She agreed. I decided to go back home, walk Miss JP, make lunch for myself, and curl up somewhere comfortable to read the Bellows biography.

  “Thank you so much,” I said to her at the door.

  “Are you kidding? I’m so happy to have met you!”

  I walked across the street and down the block feeling great. I’d been given a doorway into something and someone who mattered to Harlan, and I’d have the chance to form a reasonable opinion on Miss Pinckney without a dozen years of research. After all, I could be dead of natural causes at any minute.

  To my surprise, when I came home and into the kitchen, there was a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper sitting on a plate. I had not made a sandwich. I did not use waxed paper. I unwrapped it and looked inside. It was sliced ham and lettuce on buttered white bread. Every hair on my body stood on end, and a current ran through me as though I accidentally touched a bad wire. There was no ham in the house. I never used butter with ham.

  I ate it and it was delicious.

  After lunch and a brief escape with Little Miss JP the hound, I settled upstairs on the third floor in the sitting room opposite my bedroom. After I’d skimmed about half the book, I came to realize I was reading about Josephine in the very room where she wrote all her novels. No wonder I kept getting chills. What an eerie feeling!

  The house phone rang, shaking me out of my fog. I looked at the caller ID and saw it was Harlan. A relief, to be sure.

  “Hey! How’s Rome?” I said.

  “We’re in Florence today and, honey, it is too grand for words! I mean, we were just in the Basilica di Santa Croce, standing next to Galileo’s crypt. Can you believe?”

  “Awesome!” I said.

  “You know, t
he pope du jour thought he was a heretic and threw him in the clink.”

  “Didn’t they think everyone was a heretic?”

  “Practically! So how’s the house and my dog?”

  “Perfecto! Guess what? I’m reading Barbara Bellows’s biography of the real JP.”

  “And?”

  “Well, her momma was a pain in the butt.”

  “Camilla the Gorilla. That’s what they called her.”

  “So you said. Well, wasn’t she just a little bit like our mother? Interfering in our love life every chance she had?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And she, like me, never finished her undergraduate degree.”

  “Hmmm!”

  “And she had one brother. Like me.”

  “So are you channeling Josephine Pinckney? Are you her reincarnation?” Harlan laughed.

  “No, but there’s definitely something weird going on in this house. Last night my nightgown was on my bed when I got home.”

  “Oh, that’s just Victoria Rutledge. She puts out my PJs all the time. She was Miss Jo’s baby nurse who stayed with Jo forever.”

  “Does she make ham and lettuce sandwiches on white bread with butter and wrap them up in waxed paper?”

  “Yes! Oh my word! She must really like you, Leslie! It’s only when she decides she likes you that you get fed.”

  “Great. Scare the liver out of me. Go ahead.”

  “Eat the sandwich.”

  “I did.”

  “It’s totally harmless. In fact, I think it’s kind of nice. Anyway, that house was built in 1836. Only the good Lord knows how many people that house has seen. In the Lowcountry, you’re never alone! But you’re right. It’s haunted like all hell.”

  “Who’s here besides Victoria Rutledge and Jo? Or should I say what’s here?”

  “I’d go with whom. Let’s see. There’s Jane Wightman, who built it, and the whole Benjamin McInnes clan, not to mention my Leonard and God knows who else! Wait till you find supper waiting on the stove. Or a whole smoked ham on the sideboard. Apparently, Old Vic was a helluva cook. Leonard still makes cocktails.”