In Polite Company

by Gervais Hagerty

  The hospital bed is gone. Unhooked, unplugged, removed. I’m glad. I never liked it. It was just a primer for a coffin, anyway. Good riddance. Her and Tito’s marriage bed, which had been moved a few feet over to make room for the hospice bed, has been pushed back to its proper location at the room’s center. The blanket is neatly folded at the foot, just as always. I set the zinnias on her nightstand.

  Around the room, photos of Laudie depict her as a wife, mother, and grandmother, but I want Charlestonians to see the Laudie that no one truly knew. On the mantel is a black-and-white studio portrait of Laudie taken in her early twenties, always my favorite photo of her. I lift the photo, the silver frame tarnished, to stare at my grandmother as a young woman: a brave and hopeful maverick. Her closed lips suggest mystery and a hint of mirth—a knowing Mona Lisa smile. Those wide-set, challenging eyes seem to look right at me. “The letter,” she says. I blink hard. Obviously, she isn’t speaking to me through her photograph, but the command feels so immediate, so unambiguous, that she might as well be.

  What letter? I wrack my brain, listening for footsteps of anyone who might come upstairs. Agreeable sounds—familiar voices, the clink of liquor bottles and crystal glasses being arranged on the bar—drift up from the first floor. Everyone is busy, occupied.

  With the coast clear, I duck into Laudie’s closet. Dozens of suits, dresses, and ball gowns—a collection curated over more than half a century—wait to be worn again. When I rake the hangers to the side, hunting for a box of papers or mementos, Laudie’s scent—a mix of Shalimar and Oil of Olay—almost overpowers me.

  The shoe boxes beneath her dresses hold her pumps, sandals, and her adored collection of Capezios. I rifle through all the boxes, finding nothing but tissue paper and more shoes. Larger round boxes on the upper shelf contain her hats. In the top corner, stacks of zippered plastic bags prevent moths from eating her sweaters. Belts on hooks dangle like snakes from trees in the far reaches of her closet. I search high and low. No letter.

  I ransack her dresser, sift through bras, stockings, and silk slips. No letter here, either, but I take a moment to stroke the leather soles of her ballet slippers.

  “Simons?” Mom calls from the top of the stairs. “What are you doing?”

  I stash her shoes back inside the dresser drawer. “I’m looking for something.”

  Though I should be picking out photos, Mom appears more curious than mad. “For what?”

  “Remember I told you Laudie said something about a letter?”

  “I do, but, honey, her mind wasn’t all there.” Mom crosses the room to check herself in the mirror. “Will you look at that? My buttons are all wonky.”

  “Mom, I really think she wanted me to find some sort of document, or whatever it was.”

  “Oh, Simons, what on earth could she have possibly been hiding all these years?”

  Mom needs to know the real Laudie. She should know about the rebellious girl who jumped from train trestles and trespassed to skinny-dip. She should know the young woman who danced in Atlanta clubs where the music set people on fire. Mom needs to know about Laudie’s secret love affair with a handsome man because, in a way, it’s part of her story, too.

  When Mom knows Laudie, she’ll understand that a hidden but very alive part of Laudie surfaced in a Chanel suit that fateful day I took her to the ballet, demanding I take her on her final adventure. If Mom knew the real Laudie, she might have taken her to La Sylphide herself. “Mom, there’s a lot more to Laudie than you got to know and what Tito has told us all these years.” I hand her the black-and-white studio photograph of Laudie. Mom studies it, clasps it to her chest. I pat the bed, signaling for her to join me. “Let me tell you a story.”

  36.

  The Receiving

  A sharp wind whips over the Ashley River and funnels down Wentworth Street, stirring ripples in a giant puddle created by the recent king tide. The water is rising. And still, the builders build. Cranes dominate the Charleston skyline like leviathans. Construction crews crawl over our city like ants as developers squeeze more and more buildings onto the remaining peninsula wetlands. Few citizens understand the impending catastrophe. They’re the ones who read science. They’re the ones who raise their houses, jacking the old homesteads ten feet or more into the air. They’re the ones who know we’ll soon have to bury our dead aboveground, like they do in New Orleans.

  The Mackey building is on high ground. The oldest structures always are; it’s the newer ones from the twentieth century and onward that are built on low land or filled-in marshes. That Charleston is the Lowcountry is a fact that was not wasted on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century builders; they knew to build on high ground.

  Once a Victorian mansion, the Mackey Funeral Home looks like something out of an ominous fairy tale. Charleston, with its trove of Georgian architecture, has few Victorian buildings. After the defeat of the Civil War, hardly any Charlestonians had the wealth to build the sorts of newer houses that were fashionable in the rest of the country. The Mackey mansion is one exception.

  With its busy, drip-castle turrets and garrets, the building looks spooky and fittingly funereal. Sometime after it was constructed, a porte cochere was added to one side. This is where the coffins are loaded into hearses. It’s also where mourners gather to queue up for visitations. In Charleston, it is common for hundreds of people to pay their respects; it’s the last social courtesy that one can extend to a loved one or a friend.

  Crimson barberry shrubs, office-park favorites, line the main path. Holly bushes rim the roundabout. Affixed to the front double doors is a matching pair of colonial door knockers; they are shaped like urns. The right door is ajar. Stuffy air escapes through the crack. I push on the door.

  The foyer is surprisingly small. A faded Bokhara rug muffles my footsteps. The windows, heavily swathed in gauzy fabric, deflect the rays of afternoon sun.

  Around the corner, Mom and Dad stand with Mr. Mackey in the center of a bay-windowed parlor. The room appears frozen in the 1960s, no doubt the last time it was decorated. It is sparsely furnished—just two wing-backed chairs and a side table with an open guest book and ballpoint pen. Portraits of stern, humorless people from another era hang on the beige walls. Everything seems preserved in a thin layer of dust and eternity. “Hi.”

  “You sure look like your grandmama.” Mr. Mackey speaks quietly. The Mackeys never speak much above a whisper; quiet must be encoded in their DNA.

  Mom walks over to me, her face wet with tears. I realize I’ve never seen my mother cry; the sight of it unravels me. “I looked everywhere for that letter. I must have gone through every paper in that house.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I speak into her hair. We hold each other tight. When I told her Laudie’s story, I didn’t hold back. I told Mom everything: the skinny-dipping, the dancing, her love affair with John, and even the pregnancy scare. At first she listened quietly, playing with the pilling on Laudie’s blanket. Then she sat up straighter, looking around her mother’s room as if seeing it for the first time. “Don’t worry about the letter now,” I say. “We’ll find it.”

  A door creaks. More stuffy air enters the room.

  “Jim, we’re ready.” Charles Mackey, Jim’s brother, waits at the threshold.

  “Okay.” He turns to Mom. “Whenever you’re ready, we can view your mother.”

  Wait a minute. An open casket? She looked so horrid in the last weeks before death. I look to my mom, half-expecting her to prevent this sacrilege, march past the Mackeys, and shut the coffin lid herself.

  I’m wrong. Mom nods assent, quickly transforming to stoic, and a flash of pride for my mother rushes through me. She’s a lady, through and through. She opens her embroidered clutch and extracts a handkerchief for me. “Just in case.” I dab my eyes—already brimming—and with Dad we follow the Mackey brothers to a smaller room that’s connected to the main parlor.

  With its Pepto-Bismol pink wallpaper and dingy lighting, the viewing room looks fittingly depressing. A
t the far end is Laudie’s coffin, its open lid a yawning mouth. It has brass handles and ivory-colored satin lining.

  Eight plant stands—four on each side—flank the mahogany coffin; each holds a floral display. Some arrangements are tall and sculptural; others are loose and blowsy; a couple are low and horizontal. The flowers themselves differ wildly from one another: roses, irises, hydrangeas, bells of Ireland, lilies, tulips, baby’s breath, stock, asters, and gladiolas.

  Each bouquet has a crisp little gift envelope attached to it. It’s generous and thoughtful of people to send flowers, but wouldn’t she have enjoyed them more when she was alive? With that many flowers, she could have spent her last days in an enchanted greenhouse. I should have bought her flowers, stacked her bedroom floor-to-ceiling with them. Why didn’t I think of that?

  Dad escorts Mom to the coffin; I hang back and am soon joined by Uncle Andy. His ruddy complexion is somehow subdued by this pink light. “How was your flight?”

  “Uneventful and on time. Doesn’t get much better than that.” He jingles some coins in his pockets.

  Together we survey the room, which will soon be filled with friends and family. Jim Mackey pivots the floral arrangements so their best sides show. His brother sets out bottled water, plastic cups, a box of Kleenex. Uncle Andy gestures toward my wet handkerchief. “I see the waterworks have been turned on. You’ve been holding up okay?”

  “I’m sad. I miss her.”

  He runs a hand over his oily face. “Me, too.”

  “I haven’t looked yet. I didn’t know we were having an open casket.”

  “It might make you feel better. That’s why they do it.”

  Okay. I’ll go. I can’t not look. I approach, each footstep heavy—leaden—with reluctance. Bit by bit, Laudie comes into view, looking like a doll made to look like my grandmother. Perhaps we Episcopalians are a bit like the Egyptians, sending our dead into the afterlife dressed for a party.

  There’s a sensation in my chest, a pressure; it’s here that my powerful emotions dwell. The most prominent is a throbbing sadness. I ache for the life Laudie could have led, for the story she could have told. Why can’t we all have happy endings? How can life be so unfair?

  A second energy stirs beneath my ribs, making me queasy with guilt. I didn’t prepare Laudie for this journey in any way. It was Shaniece who used a blue sponge to moisten her dry mouth, not me. Shaniece cleaned Laudie’s body when she couldn’t. I wasn’t holding her hand the moment Laudie gasped for her last breath; I was at the office, doing the news, for Chrissakes. Maybe if I had been by her side more, there would have been an opportunity, a moment of lucidity, where she would have told me about the letter. She died wanting me to know.

  Laudie wears a lacy lilac dress—one that I’ve never seen before. How hard it must have been for Mom to choose her mother’s last outfit. The grip at my core loosens at the sight of Laudie’s Capezio dancing shoes. Mom selected those over a pair of conservative pumps, which I imagine wasn’t an easy decision for her—displaying her proper Charleston mother in what some would consider theatrical costume shoes. But she did it, and a second burst of pride for my mother washes over me.

  I stare at Laudie’s midsection, which is as immobile as her Chippendale sideboard. Of course she wouldn’t be breathing, but a visceral, primal part of me is confused; her chest should be moving up and down.

  Folded on her stomach, her hands have taken on an eerie, greenish cast. The embalming fluid has dissolved her blue veins. Her bruises, so angry and vivid just the other day, have vanished. She wears the jaguar brooch, the pearl necklace, and the gold watch she wanted me to have. I can’t help but notice it is still ticking.

  Her fluffy blond hair has been washed and neatly set into waves. Would she have wanted a ballerina bun? Somehow, the mortician unclenched her jaw. She wears a shade of lipstick—rose-petal pink—I have never seen her wear, but it does suit her. Then she opens her crystal eyes and stares right through me. She speaks to me just like she did from the black-and-white photo: “The letter.”

  I’m going crazy.

  “Honey,” Mom whispers, “people are starting to arrive. We need to form a receiving line.” I follow her out into the front parlor, where I locate Dad, Weezy, and Caroline. Tito is sitting in a chair near the door, ready to greet his friends. Andy stands next to him. My immediate family falls into line beside them. I stand between my sisters, all of us in demure, chaste funeral dresses.

  I’ve stood in a receiving line twice before: at Weezy’s “coming out” party and at my own. “Coming out” is the old-fashioned term for debuting. At the ball, all glamorized in our gowns, we debutantes had to remain in the receiving line for the first hour of the party. Hundreds of guests came through to greet us. Some shook our hands; others air-kissed us. They wanted to keep our expensive updos intact and knew better than to leave lipstick marks on our cheeks. Still, there were always a few gregarious men in the line who bear-hugged, inadvertently impressing their metal cuff links on our bare backs or ramming their jackets into our powdered faces.

  It was through the ritual of the receiving line, and later, at the grand waltz, that we debutantes were formally introduced to society. We were exuberant, charming, extravagant in our gestures. And for the occasion, we dressed in the uniform of all Charleston debutantes before us. We wore white.

  Today, we wear black. We greet our tribe, the same people who suited up and dressed up for the big balls and cocktail parties, but this time, we gather to say goodbye. This is my culture. It’s what we do.

  The room quickly swells with friends, neighbors, acquaintances, cousins, and colleagues. They move through the receiving line before moving on to view Laudie. Most quickly say they’re sorry for our loss so as not to hold up the line, but some pause to ask about my work or touch Weezy’s belly or tell Caroline how beautiful she is.

  A bottleneck forms around Mom, giving me an opportunity to look out the window. A queue of mourners snakes past the porte cochere, down the walkway, and out to the street. About midway in the line stands a man the exact same build as Trip, wearing—like most of the men today—a black suit. When he turns, a narrow tomahawk face gazes toward the window. Not Trip, thank goodness. I wouldn’t know what to think or say.

  The guy must be a Sanders. Everyone in that family, even the heavyset ones, have narrow heads. Like Mom and all the other locals, I can identify Old Charleston family groups by their dominant features: the Huguets have Roman noses; the Taveaus walk with a goofy gait; the Vanderhorsts, with their enviable olive skin, never have to hide from the sun.

  Three of Caroline’s debutante friends shimmy toward us. I recognize one of them—Bennett. She reaches past me to get to Caroline. “Hope it’s okay to jump in line,” she says. I step back so I don’t get trampled.

  “Totally,” Caroline says.

  Bennett turns to me. “I’m really sorry for your loss. I heard she was a remarkable lady.”

  “Thanks,” I say, wishing she would go away but unsure why I feel so strongly. She spins back to Caroline, whispers something in her ear. Caroline hurries her along, says something about meeting up later.

  A hulking figure makes his way toward the receiving line. It’s unmistakably Sonny Boykin; he stands a foot taller than everyone else. When he gets close, he eclipses my view of the room. He speaks in a proper Old Charleston drawl, which owes something to Bostonese (in which the r’s are dropped) and something to the mellifluous Gullah language (in which the spaces between words and syllables are elongated and exaggerated, as though filled with syrup). “Cooper” is “Coop-ah.” “Water” is “Wat-ah.” “Dog” is “dawg.” It’s the accent of my tribe, and it’s dying as my generation marries outside of the tribe or moves away. “Your grandmama was a great woman.”

  The controversy around him has died; Ms. Ronan dropped the charges. We may never know what he did or didn’t do. Still, I have my suspicions. As Martha once told me, a good ol’ boy can never fail. The princes and heirs apparent of Cha
rleston are always forgiven. He leans over slightly; his large hand presses, lingers momentarily on my spine. I will my body to be bigger and look him dead in the eyes. “You have no idea,” I hear myself say.

  If he is insulted, he doesn’t show it. Once he gets through the receiving line, he’s greeted warmly by the crowd. Most of them likely presume his innocence. Even if any of them harbored suspicions, they would still be cordial.

  “Hi, friend.”

  I jump. It’s Martha. She wears a chunky sweater and a maxi skirt. Her eyes are a little puffy, but in the way that suggests she’s had a good night’s sleep. She’s gained weight; the bit of extra fat makes her look younger, her skin springier, more voluptuous, more even toned. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Of course I would come. How are you holding up?”

  Shitty. “Fine.”

  “I’m sorry about your grandma.”

  “Thanks,” I manage, still trying to figure out if I’m glad she’s here or hugely annoyed. That week she toured with the band—when she had lied and told me she was visiting her grandmother—I babysat her dog. I picked up his shit practically with my bare hand. She might or might not be dating Harry.

  “Coffee soon? I’ll call you, okay? I miss you.”

  Do I miss her? I’m not so sure. “Sounds good.” There’s no time to say much more; the line’s too long, and now I’m the bottleneck.

  Mom’s friends—BFFs since Crescent Academy—flutter past in a two-tone flock of black and pearl, all lean and plumed like wood storks. A few ancient widows, escorted by their caretakers, shuffle down the line. We say our hellos to neighbors and what seems like the entire membership of Battery Hall. We’ve probably spoken to two hundred people. My feet hurt. I’m hungry. I’m hangry. I’m tired.