Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair
Page 4
Chapter 4 – The Type of Girl I Am
The type of girl I am has to do with family history and genes. That is what Roger referred to when we stood looking at the painting and said I am like the girl in the painting: "She’s you; or you’re her." There's a family story that illustrates this transfer of behavioral traits down to me from earlier Bedgewood women, and it is recorded in the book The Buildings of Charleston by the architectural historian, Jonathan Poston. I like Jonathan because he is a great scholar, and because he dresses so perfectly retrograde. Winter or summer, one can see Jonathan walking the streets with this khaki pants perfectly pressed, and his starched-like-a-board white shirt with those cool and old fashioned creases and pleats at the shoulders and wrists, and of course the obligatory bow tie. If its ninety-five degrees in the shade and ninety percent humidity, Jonathan still will sport a white dress shirt and tie.
In his book entry describing the historic Luxembourg Hotel in Charleston, Poston tells a delicious anecdote about Elspeth and her husband, Lowndes. Lowndes was the sixth mayor of Charleston, mayoring from 1832 till 1842, and Elspeth was the daughter of Gillespie Bedgewood, governor of South Carolina from 1819 till 1824. Lowndes was wild, and Elspeth was wilder. They both had money, even when young, and they both loved horses, and they both could shoot shotguns, and they both loved to drink English gin and French bordeaux, and they both loved to make love. Now that, folks, is the recipe for fun.
Lowndes and Elspeth weren’t married when they decided they would have fun together, though they ended up hitched for twenty-six years. Before they got married they had to find places where they could have the types of fun they wanted, and one of those was the hotel. When the owner of the hotel objected to them firing shotguns at pigeons while standing in the garden, they had to give up that fun. Sometimes they raced their horses down Broad Street past the hotel, him on his gelding quarter horse and her on her Arabian mare, but that ended when the City decided Broad Street deserved more that hard-packed dirt as a surface, and installed cobblestones taken from the holds of ships. The stone was loaded into the ships in England as ballast, and unloaded in the ports of Charleston and Savannah and Wilmington. Anyway, the horses couldn’t run on the cobblestones, which eliminated that fun.
It should be pretty obvious what was left for Lowndes and Elspeth to do. They would ride sedately to the hotel, look wistfully at the flying pigeons as they crossed through the garden, and enter the hotel bar. There they would start with the bordeaux, and after a couple of glasses, they would graduate to gin. Lowndes wished he had trained Elspeth to like port, as he felt that was a more civilized drink than gin, but he knew what she liked and he wasn’t about to mess with a formula that worked so well and provided him with so much pleasure later in the day.
After a gin or two, and after much conversation with the other bar tenants, and after lots of laughing and maybe a dance step or two, and after giving Henry the hotel owner a lot of shit for not letting them shoot out in the garden, well, Elspeth would look at Lowndes, and Lowndes would look at Elspeth, and that was that; up the stairs they would go.
Now Jonathan the architectural historian, being a true Charlestonian, would not overtly describe a romantic assignation at the Luxembourg, but he was not above alluding to it. So in his book on the buildings of Charleston he simply states that after Lowndes and Elspeth would depart, the other patrons of the hotel bar patiently would settle into a silence and wait for the inevitable. The inevitable inevitably came from above in the form of shrieks of laughter, loud thumps, and much verbal bubbling of energetic endearments. With this done, the habitués of the bar knew that all was right with the world, and they would return to their mint juleps, scotch lemonades, and discussions about the evils of northern culture.
I like this story, and soon after Roger and I were married, demanded that we become the 21st century counterparts of Elspeth and Lowndes. We agreed that riding down Broad Street on horseback probably would snarl downtown traffic, and we agreed that carrying shotguns probably would generate frowns on the part of the police. So we've been left with drinking and making love. And unlike Elspeth, I appreciate the virtues of port, so now after the obligatory two glasses of bordeaux, we graduate to the Portuguese elixir.
Oh, and there's one more little difference between Elspeth and me. She fired shotguns in the garden of the hotel and raced horses down the main drag of town, while I, umm, steal works of art. And that's the type of girl I am.