by Karen White
My mother started reading her book on the way home, leaving me with more time than I wanted to picture her cutting out pictures from magazines for a girlhood room I would never have, and to ponder all the reasons why Bernadett would have ordered those particular books, and why she hadn’t wanted Helena to know.
CHAPTER 19
The early-morning air held a coolness despite its being summer, and I had the sunroof of the Volvo opened to the sky. The drive down Highway 174 was one filled with color and light, passing the local restaurants and produce stands and the myriad white wooden churches that dotted the island. Growing up here, I’d never appreciated the beauty of the old highway, of the canopies of oaks that cast light and shadow over the road, and the way the road stretched over the winding creeks and marsh. You could smell the pluff mud through the open windows of the car as soon as you crossed the bridge over the Dawho River, a scent you never forgot no matter how hard you didn’t want to remember.
I recalled Eve and Lucy and me on our bicycles on the same road, without shoes or helmets or anything that would distract us from feeling the wind in our hair or going as fast as we could. I was always in the lead, always determined to go faster, to turn sharper. Even in those days before my daddy died, my need to agitate my senses always pushed at my back.
Although it was the middle of the week, Gigi accompanied me. Her head was tilted back so she could watch the passing limbs of the trees, her mouth open as if she was surprised that there was a world above her that she’d never suspected, as if no one had ever shown her before.
The canceled French immersion camp had apparently been a two-week deal, and Harper had already made plans during the second week that she couldn’t rearrange, so Finn had been left to juggle his work and Gigi. I hadn’t waited for him to ask me to help, volunteering to bring Gigi with me to Edisto. Although I enjoyed her company, I would be lying by saying I didn’t have ulterior motives—she was a lovely buffer between Helena and me. At the very least, it would give me the perfect opportunity to start her piano lessons.
As we neared the single sweetgrass basket stand on Edisto, I slowed to see if I recognized the woman seated to the side of the hut. Dah Georgie was long gone, as were all of the Edisto basket makers Lucy and I had known, and I knew that the women who infrequently inhabited this stand came all the way from Charleston. Still, I slowed, belatedly realizing the face I’d been wanting to see was the face of the woman from my dreams.
“Can we stop?” Gigi’s voice piped up from the backseat.
“Sure.” With a glance in the rearview mirror, I made a quick U-turn in the middle of the road, then drove up onto the grass near the basket stand.
The woman was humming a song I recognized, having heard Dah Georgie sing it many times. “Take Me to the Water” was used at riverside baptisms in Lucy’s family. It seemed their baptisms were more authentic than ours at the Presbyterian church, but I’d never mentioned that to my mother, knowing I’d probably have received a stiff punishment for even broaching the subject. But I still loved the song, and it was the words “take me to the water” that I heard when I thought of the myriad creeks and waterways of my childhood. It made my exile easier to accept, somehow, as if all I needed to do was find a boat and put it on a river to take me home.
Gigi held my hand as we approached the woman, who looked up and smiled at us, revealing bright white teeth with a gold tooth on the bottom. Her hair was steel gray threaded through with thin reeds of black, the pattern resembling those of some of her baskets. She wore a blue-and-white-checkered dress that threatened the integrity of the buttons holding the front together over her voluminous chest. We greeted each other while Gigi looked at the baskets. She stood on tiptoes to see the ones on the higher shelves, then squatted to see those closer to the ground, taking her time to examine each one carefully with her fingers.
I opened my mouth to tell her to look without touching, but the basket weaver put her hand on my arm. “It be okay,” she said, nodding in Gigi’s direction. “The milk still dry on her face.”
Gigi frowned up at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re young. But you still need to be careful.”
“I know,” she said, sounding impatient. “She’s got almost as many baskets as Aunt Bernadett,” she said, running her fingers along the edge of a large tomb-shaped basket with a lid.
The old woman laughed, her fingers not pausing in her work. She was at the beginning stage of a basket, making the bottom, just past the seven rows of palmetto strips where she’d begun to weave in the sweetgrass. Dah Georgie had taught me that from this stage any basket of any design could be made, and it was up to the weaver to decide. Each strand, each leaf, would determine how it would look, making it impossible to go back and start again without unraveling the whole thing.
I watched her for a moment, relishing the power she held in her hands, and wondering what it would be like to start from scratch again, to determine the size and shape of your life with the benefit of hindsight.
Gigi was still staring at the large oval-shaped basket with a lid. “I could fit in that, don’t you think, Ellie?”
The old woman leaned over to see what Gigi was looking at. “That one called the Escape Hatch.”
Gigi tilted her head to the side. “Do they all have names?”
“Most. Some of the old designs, their names be forgotten with the names of the sweetgrass maker who make them.”
I watched as she slowly turned the round bottom of the unmade basket, the skin of her hands dark and worn like old leather. “Do you know what you’re making yet?”
She looked up at me and I saw that one of her eyes was cloudy with a cataract, but it didn’t seem to be slowing her down, as her nimble fingers manipulated her sewing bone and the grass as if they had eyes of their own. “Not yet. I feel the grass first, let it warm in my hands and let it tell me what it want to be. Sometimes you got to bend it and twist it and pull it hard before it knows.”
“What’s this one called?”
We looked at Gigi, who gingerly held a shallow basket with a narrow base and opening but with a wider middle. The handle was two to three times the height of the basket, with delicate loops and swirls decorating the sides.
“That an old one. They use it for an egg basket, but the pattern called Path of Tears.”
Gigi frowned, then delicately set it back on the shelf before picking up another. This one had no handle or lid and was wider on the bottom than at the top. “What about this one?”
The woman squinted for a moment. “Dreams of Rivers.”
I walked over to Gigi and she placed it in my hands. I felt the smooth, tightly woven grass tucked into the tightly wound palmetto frond binding. “How much for this one?”
“Are you going to buy it?” Gigi asked.
“For Helena,” I said before the thought had completely formed in my head.
“Because of the name?”
I looked down at this wise child, once again amazed that she was only ten. “Yes. She told me that she used to live by the Danube River when she was a girl. And now she lives by the Edisto River. I think she might appreciate the name.”
“And she doesn’t have any of her own baskets—they’re all Aunt Bernadett’s. Aunt Helena needs one by her bed, I think, to put her glasses and her watch and the TV controls in, even though she’s always asking me to turn it on and off and change the channels because she can’t figure it out.”
I smiled. “It’s settled, then.” I handed the basket to her while I reached for my wallet. The price was high, as I had predicted for a piece of handcrafted artwork, but I paid it with just a little bargaining down, since that was expected. I had a little more spending money, thanks to Finn’s generosity, and even though I couldn’t quite believe I was buying something for Helena, the basket with the name Dreams of Rivers had to belong to her.
Gigi was uncharacteristicall
y silent as we made our way to the house, the basket held carefully on her lap. I drove extra slowly past the pecan tree orchard, thinking maybe she needed more time to get all her words together.
She finally spoke as I put the car in park. “There’s another basket.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Another basket?” I had no idea where this was leading.
“Remember how Aunt Helena wanted us to gather all the music from Aunt Bernadett’s baskets and we’ve been working on putting them together in those pink binders that we bought even though I tried to find another color that I liked as much?”
I shifted in my seat and turned to face her, giving me a moment to process the subject of her sentence. “Yes. I was hoping that since you’re here today we can work on that project a little after we have your first piano lesson.”
She looked at me earnestly. “Yes, ma’am. We can do that. But first I was wondering if we should go get that other basket.”
“You mean another basket with music in it? You know where there’s another one?”
Gigi nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know if there’s music in it. I was too afraid to look inside.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Where did you find this basket?”
She looked down at her hands. Almost mumbling, she said, “In Aunt Bernadett’s room.”
Oh. I waited for her to continue.
“I know I’m not supposed to go in there, but sometimes when I’m here with my daddy and you’re not here and Aunt Helena is sleeping and Daddy’s busy on his computer or phone, I get bored and I’m not supposed to leave the house by myself so I sometimes walk around the house looking for something to do.”
I remembered doing the exact same thing, and the temptation of a closed door to a room I was told to stay out of. With a neutral voice, I said, “So you went into Aunt Bernadett’s room and saw the basket.”
She bit her lower lip.
“Where was the basket?” I prodded.
“Under her bed,” she said very quietly.
As somebody who’d been caught inside the armoire, I wasn’t about to castigate her for looking under the bed. “Is it still there?” I asked.
She shook her head.
When nothing else seemed forthcoming, I asked, “Do you know where it is?”
She nodded her head. “It’s under my bed.”
“At the Edisto house?” I asked hopefully.
“No.” Her voice sounded very small. “At my other house. I took it to look inside, but then my daddy called for me and I got scared so I stuck it in my bag to hide it and then I brought it home with me, but then I felt guilty about it so I just hid it under my bed.”
I sighed heavily. “All right. So all you need to do is bring it with you when you come on Saturday and then put it back.”
“I thought of that, too, but then I thought that maybe Aunt Helena doesn’t know about that basket and would like to know what’s inside it and maybe there’s music in there that needs to go in the binders and we’d be doing her a favor by looking inside of it.”
I paused for a moment to process what she was saying. “Yes, it’s certainly possible that there’s music we need in that basket, and that the basket was simply overlooked at some point or even accidentally shoved under the bed. I’m even thinking that Helena forgot there were a few baskets in Bernadett’s room, since she told us not to go in there.” I paused, thinking. “If you like, I can come over tomorrow after work and we can look in it together and then replace it when we come back on Saturday.”
She grinned broadly. “I knew you’d figure it out. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said as I climbed out of the car, eager to get to the house before I changed my mind and headed back to Charleston to find out what might be in Bernadett’s basket.
Nurse Kester was in the kitchen making photocopies of the more intact pieces of sheet music using the small copier Finn had brought from his office. The kitchen table was littered with die cuts, glue, and the purple see-through pocket folders. She looked up apologetically when we came through the doorway.
“Nurse Weber said that if I got caught up I could work on the music. Miss Szarka is resting right now and there’s nothing on television, so I figured why not?”
“Thank you,” I said, placing the Dreams of Rivers basket on the table. “I was hoping to use the piano, but I don’t want to disturb Miss Szarka.”
Nurse Kester shook her head. “Don’t worry about that. There are pocket doors that separate the music room from the hallway. There’s some good, sound construction in this house—which is why it’s been here for so long—and she won’t be able to hear anything back in her room.”
“Great. Then we’ll go ahead and get started. Could you please let us know when she awakens?”
Gigi skipped to the music room—a good sign that she hadn’t been coerced, I thought—and I followed her, gently sliding closed the pocket doors behind us. They were two inches thick of solid wood and I knew Nurse Kester had been right.
The curtains remained opened, the room now filled with light. None of the portraits were in direct sunlight, and the woman in the long red velvet dress on the wall facing the piano seemed to glow in her newfound view of the world.
I sat on the edge of the piano bench and motioned for Gigi to come sit beside me. I pointed to the M in the “Mason & Hamlin” written on the fall board. With my index finger, I slid it from the letter down to the keys, finding the white key directly to the left of the two black keys. “This is middle C. You should always position your bench so that you can sit right in front of this key. That’s a good starting place so that you can reach the entire keyboard.”
“Kind of like first position in ballet. Every step and position starts from there.”
“Exactly,” I said, making a mental note to use as many dance correlations as I could think of. “Before we start learning how to read music, I want you to get comfortable with your fingers on the keys.” I paused, hearing my words echo my father’s the first time he’d sat me on the piano bench. I’d been five and had grown tired of waiting to play myself and had simply crawled up to sit next to him. He’d had an electric keyboard at the time, but within a year my father had bought the Mason & Hamlin.
“Put your right hand up here on the keyboard with your thumb on middle C.”
“When do I get to use the pedals?”
I bit back a smile. “You have to wait for a while before we get to that. Using the pedals is like being put in pointe shoes. You’d hurt yourself if you tried it too early.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You can get hurt playing the piano?”
“Only if your aunt Helena is here with her cane,” I muttered.
I showed Gigi how to keep her wrists lifted and to round her fingers so the tips hit the keys. She was an avid pupil and listened carefully without growing frustrated. But by the end of half an hour we were both ready for a break.
Gigi slid off the bench. “I want you to play now.”
“I don’t think—”
“Madame LaFleur always dances for us when we’ve worked really hard. Unless you don’t think you can. Aunt Helena says that the reason why you won’t play for her is because you really don’t know how and that the songs you played that first time you were here were the only songs you knew and that you’ve played them so many times that they sound like they come from a can.”
I looked at her steadily, unraveling her words to the starting place to make sure my anger was directed at the right person. “Did she, now?” I asked, standing up and moving to the edge of the room, where the stacks of music we’d been gathering lay sorted in their various piles. “Do you remember where we put the Debussy?”
Gigi skipped over to a pile beneath the portrait of the woman in the red dress. “You said you were putting all the composers who weren’t Be
ethoven, Mozart, or Chopin in this pile.”
“I did?” I asked, not remembering the reasoning behind my methodology. I did remember, however, the general ill will I’d felt toward my assignment and the woman who’d issued it, which most likely had a lot to do with the incomprehension of my organizational edict.
I squatted down and began thumbing through the sheet music, having remembered seeing a copy of “Clair de Lune” that was not in a book. I was halfway through the pile when I found it. I held it up like a prize. “I think you’ll like this one,” I said.
I placed it on the music stand, then made a grand show of sitting in front of middle C and adjusting the bench accordingly. I studied the music for a long time, my fingers seeming to remember the notes in the way a memory is resurrected by a forgotten scent. I loved Debussy and this piece in particular for the sheer beauty of it; the brightness of the melody mixed with sensuality made this piece and all of his music a joy to listen to and to play. It had been the first composition I’d learned on my own, and the first time I’d ever seen my father cry. It had embarrassed him, and he’d swiped at his cheeks with the back of his weathered hand and pretended he had something in his eye.
“I hope you’ll like it, Gigi. Claude Debussy was known as the founder of musical Impressionism—although he always disputed that. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation to dancing Impressionism, but maybe you’re familiar with the paintings.”
She stared at me blankly, corroborating my suspicion that I was not a born teacher.
“All right, then,” I said, placing my hands over the keys. “I’ll probably make some mistakes, but try to enjoy the music. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you to watch my fingers or anything like that because I’m not sure I’ll do it correctly.”
Gigi sat down on the small love seat, her feet barely brushing the floor. “Stop making excuses and just play.”
I didn’t bother to ask if she’d come up with that on her own. I’d never met Madame LaFleur, but from what I’d learned of her, it sounded like something she would have said.