Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “How to drive.” Mrs. Vanderhorst looked down at the photograph again and then held it to her heart. “Thank you so much for this. I’ll write to Henry. You know, he has done such a remarkable job with the paper. And I hear he is a wonderful father.” Mrs. Vanderhorst looked across the room. “You know, Eliza, we all would be very happy if you came back to Charleston.”

  “I don’t know what I could do here.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Vanderhorst said, “there may be something you could help me with. That is, if you have the time.” Mrs. Vanderhorst disappeared up a creaky set of narrow stairs and returned holding a framed canvas. “That nice man who runs the new art gallery was interested in seeing it, so I brought it into the shop.”

  “Here, let me help you.” Eliza stood up and took the picture—a portrait of a young woman—from Mrs. Vanderhorst.

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  Eliza took the portrait to the window and looked at it in the natural light. “It’s lovely.”

  “It was passed down in William’s family as a Henrietta Johnston.” Mrs. Vanderhorst referred to the eighteenth-century artist who had come to Charleston with her husband when he had been sent from his post in Ireland by the Church of England to serve as minister of St. Philip’s Church.

  Eliza shifted the angle at which she held the pastel of the young woman dressed in a simple, pale green dress and yellow shawl that was characteristic of a colonial woman. The neckline formed a gentle V, and her neck and chest were unadorned. The sitter sat facing slightly away from the front of the portrait, about one-eighth of a turn. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a loose bun. Her most remarkable feature was her unnaturally large eyes, which looked straight ahead.

  “I’m not that familiar with Johnston, but it does look like an eighteenth-century pastel. She has beautiful eyes.” Eliza turned the portrait over.

  “Sadly there is no signature. William always said that was Henrietta Johnston’s style—those eyes. The Library Society and the Historical Society have a small collection relating to Henrietta Johnston, and then of course William’s father gave a large collection of the Vanderhorst family papers to the Historical Society before his death.”

  “Do you mind if I put her over there?”

  “Of course not, dear.”

  Eliza stood up and propped the painting in a chair across the room. She backed away, looking at the image from different distances. “Do you know anything about the sitter?”

  “William thought that she might be one of the Guignard daughters who had married the son of Arnaud Bruneau, a wealthy French nobleman who had been granted three thousand acres on the Santee near the coast by the Lords Proprietors. William’s grandmother on his mother’s side was a Bruneau. At some point they suffered a great loss to their fortune, and the letters and records of that period became very sparse. William thought the change in circumstances may have had something to do with the Revolutionary War or possibly yellow fever. William had started the research in the archives of the Guignard family just before he died, and I thought I might carry it on, but I find those letters and diaries written in the 1700s and 1800s too difficult for my eyes.”

  Eliza knew what Mrs. Vanderhorst was asking her to do. “Do you by any chance have a measuring tape? I want to write down the dimensions.”

  Mrs. Vanderhorst stood up slowly and returned with a measuring tape, a pencil, and a photograph of the pastel. “This might be helpful.” She handed the photograph to Eliza.

  “May I keep this?”

  “Yes, dear, that’s for you. I also have Margaret Simons Middleton’s biography on Johnston, which I can get for you.”

  “I think we have a copy at home, I think I remember seeing it in our library, but I’ll let you know if we don’t.”

  Eliza measured the drawing and wrote the dimensions on the back of the photograph. “I’ll see if I can turn up anything more about her, but if nothing has turned up now, we should be”—Eliza read Mrs. Vanderhorst’s expression—“well, we should just be aware of that.”

  ELIZA WAS MEANT TO RETURN TO LONDON A WEEK FROM THE coming Saturday. On her walk back home, she organized in her mind how she would fit the work for Mrs. Vanderhorst into the ten days she had left in Charleston. The two main historical archives, the Charleston Library Society and the South Carolina Historical Society, would be closed on the weekend, so that meant she had only eight days for research. She knew Mrs. Vanderhorst needed her help. She guessed that whatever Mr. Vanderhorst had left when he died was now depleted, and without children to help, Mrs. Vanderhorst needed the money that the sale of the painting could bring. She could probably build a career here authenticating works of art, but Eliza suspected the results would only bring disappointing news to families she had grown up with. The art of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was primarily portraits painted by a handful of artists—Theus, Benbridge, Sully, Johnston—and probably only a small subset remained. Many had most likely perished if not in one of the great fires of 1740 and 1838 then in the less-than-ideal conditions caused by the heat and humidity of Charleston summers. Eliza had been in most of these houses. When it came to attribution, what had been speculation, after a few generations, became conviction. She would do what she could for Mrs. Vanderhorst, but she would leave everything else alone. And she doubted she could find an answer for Mrs. Vanderhorst unless she delayed her return. When she arrived home, she gathered up the Magritte manuscript and for the next five hours sat at the dining room table, proofreading the pages to send back to London the following day.

  At half past five, Eliza put her work aside. She had almost eighty pages ready to send. Her mind was no longer sharp. She walked down to the library at the back of the dining room to search for the Middleton biography of Johnston. In the eighteenth century, this small room, now lined with books, had been a “warming” room where servants kept food warm and waited until they were needed to serve. Eliza’s father had designed the cypress bookcases to the ceiling with eighteenth-century detail. Eliza walked two fingers across the spines of the books and tilted her head to read the titles. The books, arranged alphabetically by subject matter, were as her father had left them. He had been the last person to open many of them. He would sit in the armchair in the corner next to the fireplace and read many evenings late into the night. The bookcase between the two windows facing the garden was devoted to books on South Carolina. She found his books on Alfred Hutty, Jeremiah Theus, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O’Neil Verner, but nothing on Henrietta Johnston. She turned back to the cases by the fireplace and looked through the biographies. She knew her father would have been pleased that she was searching through his books. There, between a fat biography of Victor Hugo and Ellmann’s hefty biography of Joyce, was Middleton’s Henrietta Johnston of Charles Town, South Carolina, America’s First Pastellist. Eliza didn’t allow herself to wonder what all these books told her about her father, for she knew if she had too many things to look for, she would get lost. She pulled the slim volume out and sat down in her father’s armchair to read, but she found her mind slipping off the page. She closed the book and promised herself she would get up early tomorrow to start.

  Eliza returned to her room, changed into a silk slip dress, and pulled a light shawl around her shoulders. Ten to six. She wasn’t due at Henry’s until six thirty, but she wanted to get away from her papers. She walked down to White Point Gardens and watched a group of four small boys playing on the cannons and mortars and cemented stacks of cannonballs. She, Weezie, and Billy had spent countless afternoons climbing the low branches of the live oak trees and playing games among the war monuments.

  She did not know how Mrs. Vanderhorst had carried on without them. It was Henry who had told her. It was the summer before she and Weezie were headed to college, she to Princeton and Weezie to the University of Virginia to join Billy, who was a sophomore. As a graduation present, Eliza’s mother had taken her on a ten-day trip to Florence and Rome. When Henry called, Eliza had been in her roo
m at the Excelsior Hotel folding a floral skirt to pack in her suitcase—for some reason she remembered the exact color and pattern of her skirt. Billy and Weezie had been sailing Billy’s J/24 in the last regatta of the summer. They were winning the race, and when a late afternoon squall came up, they didn’t turn back in time. Their boat was hit by lightning. Eliza and her mother returned early, and Henry met them at the airport, and they drove to see Mr. and Mrs. Vanderhorst.

  LIVING IN CITIES LIKE NEW YORK AND LONDON HAD GIVEN Eliza a freedom and anonymity from her past. Nothing in those cities pulled her back. It was the exploration of the present—not the recovery of the past—that gave her joy. But she understood that the deep roots she had in Charleston were both a privilege and a curse, and she wondered if any other place could be home.

  Eliza checked her watch—6:10. The sky was blue at the horizon and faded into a pale blue gray at the ceiling of the sky. She turned and walked west across the park under the canopies of the live oaks. As she turned up Legare Street, she saw Cal Edwards, standing in the middle of the street positioning a tall ladder against the side of his house. She called hello.

  He crossed the street to kiss her on the cheek. “I thought I saw you at the party the other evening.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you look as if you’re planning to paint your house,” Eliza said.

  “I am. I asked Ross Barnwell to give me an estimate, and it was—as I told Ross—highway robbery, so I told Mother I would do it myself.”

  “Have you ever done this before?”

  “No, but half the painters on Ross’s crews are three sheets to the wind by eleven A.M., so I figured, how hard can it be?”

  He moved the base of the ladder from the uneven slate paving stones of the sidewalk to the smooth asphalt of the street. He tested the stability of the ladder with a shake. “Well,” he said, “here goes,” and started to climb the ladder with his paintbrush and gallon of paint.

  “Cal, I feel I should wish you good luck.”

  He stopped his climb, turned, and saluted with his paintbrush. “Perhaps bon voyage. This may take me a while.”

  A horse-drawn carriage had stopped in front of the Heyward house as Eliza approached. The tour guide was in the middle of telling the story about the ghost on the third floor of 14 Legare who occasionally appears to duel with the ghost in the house across the street. The tourists were straining upward to examine the third-floor window. As Eliza rang the doorbell, Isaiah, the Heywards’ elderly butler, dressed in a white coat and black trousers, opened the front door. The tour guide gave a click of his tongue and a slap of the reins. The horse leaned into its harness and pulled away.

  “Miss Eliza,” Isaiah said. “I’ll tell Mrs. Heyward you are here.”

  “Is Henry here?”

  “He called and said he would be here directly.”

  Eliza followed Isaiah into the front parlor. She looked around the pale yellow room. It was a comfortable mix of Charleston pieces that had been passed down in the Heyward family and English pieces Mrs. Heyward had brought down from New York. Eliza was studying a portrait of Mr. Heyward’s grandmother when she heard dog feet clatter down the stairs and then Mrs. Heyward’s voice.

  “Eliza, I’m so happy to see you.” Mrs. Heyward’s blond cocker spaniel leaped ahead and jumped up to Eliza. “Rascal, down, sit down.” She kissed Eliza on both cheeks. “Eliza, you look wonderful.”

  Eliza sat next to Mrs. Heyward on the maize-colored silk damask sofa.

  The house was still so pretty and elegant with high ceilings, large symmetrically placed windows, and delicately carved neoclassical cornices and door architraves. The great houses such as this were built in the late 1700s and early 1800s from fortunes made from rice and indigo production. Owners had instructed architects to copy what they had seen in England, though what was built in the colonies was simpler and on a much less grand scale.

  Rascal jumped up on the back of the sofa where Eliza was sitting and started licking her ear.

  “Rascal, get down.” Mrs. Heyward scooped the small frantic dog in her arms. “He is making a complete fool of himself.” She turned to Eliza. “Now, dear, tell me all about you.”

  Eliza was in the middle of explaining her fellowship at the Courtauld when Henry burst through the front door and rushed into the parlor. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up and crumpled.

  “Eliza has just been telling me all about her interesting work at—”

  Henry interrupted by asking his mother, “Is Lawton here?”

  “He was just having his supper with Cora in the kitchen.”

  “Eliza hasn’t met him yet. I’ll get him.” Henry disappeared and returned with Lawton one step behind him. He was thin and suntanned with sandy brown, sun-streaked hair. He wore a white tee shirt and a pair of white tennis shorts. He held out his hand to Eliza.

  “Have you been playing tennis?” Eliza asked Lawton.

  Lawton folded his hands across his chest and looked down.

  “One or two-handed backhand?”

  “One.”

  “Then your favorite must be Sampras?”

  Lawton shrugged his shoulders, and Henry winked at Eliza. “I’m trying to get Lawton to sail with me in the Yacht Club Regatta, but all he wants to do is play tennis.”

  “Well, I think I’d rather play tennis than go sailing, too. I was never very good at sailing,” Eliza said. “I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.”

  Henry turned to Lawton and brushed the top of his head with his hand. “We’ll let you get back to your supper.”

  As they walked back to the kitchen, Eliza heard Henry asking Lawton about the book he was reading and telling him to spend the night in the main house. “Just not sure what time we’re going to get back, but it’ll probably be after nine, so you should sleep here.”

  Henry returned and then almost immediately disappeared to change, and Mrs. Heyward entertained Eliza with stories about the time she had lived as a young girl with her family in England. “I had the most beautiful chestnut mare, and when my father told us we would be moving back, I was so upset. I went down to the barn and put my arms around her and sobbed. I cried myself to sleep with my horse. My word, I was a silly girl. You see, I was awfully young and I—”

  Henry reappeared. “Mother, are you sure you don’t want to come with us over to Anne’s?”

  “No, thank you. I have some things I need to take care of here. And I’m happy not to run into that crazy cousin of yours. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it tomorrow—Anne is coming over for lunch.”

  As Henry and Eliza walked across the street to the large Italianate brick house, Henry caught hold of her arm and held her back to allow two young boys on bicycles to pass. “Don’t worry. Lawton will come around.”

  But she was worried. She also had felt Lawton’s resistance.

  The boys held on to leashes that were connected to a pair of overexcited Brittany spaniels. The boys laughed and shouted to one another as they raced down Legare Street.

  “So how are you?” Henry said and smiled, as if he had heard something funny.

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s improve that, then.” Henry reached for her hand as they crossed the street. He rang the doorbell, listened for a few minutes, and then knocked hard with his fist. He opened the massive mahogany door. “Anne?”

  “Henry, Eliza,” Anne greeted them from the second floor, and with elaborate arm gestures, as if she were conducting a piece of romantic music, beckoned them to join her. “I’m so pleased you came.” They climbed the wide staircase, and as they entered the formal rooms of the second floor, Anne said to Henry, “Louisa should be here any minute with her new beau.” Anne turned to Eliza and shielded her mouth with the back of her palm. “Don’t say anything you don’t want to read about in the papers.” She offered them a glass of wine and then disappeared to the back kitchen to get the cocktail napkins she had forgotten. A mixture
of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century portraits hung among Anne’s large bright abstract paintings.

  Henry walked up behind Eliza and spoke so only she could hear him. “If you could steal anything in this room, what would it be?” He put his drink down and put his hands around her upper arms. He turned her slowly around the room. “The Lartigue family candlesticks,” he suggested, then turned her ninety degrees, “the Ramsay of James Oglethorpe,” and then another ninety degrees, “the portrait of Mary Golightly, the Thomas Elfe secretary, or one of Anne’s canvases.” He turned her toward him. “Then there’s always me.”

  “Hmm, not sure,” she mused.

  “Wrong answer.” He let go of her arms and held his forehead. “You missed your cue. What am I going to do with you? You’re always missing your lines.”

  Louisa arrived with Charles Stevens, and the conversation became animated and quickly wandered to what house had just sold and for how much, who might be getting divorced, and complaints about the mayor and the rising property taxes. Eliza’s eye caught on a colorful painting of the back of three nuns looking out over open water. “Is this yours?” she asked Anne.

  Anne nodded. “I did that several years ago, I was experimenting with using bright colors for things that are normally black, like nuns’ habits. I’m doing portraits right now. I’m painting Sallie Izard. She wanted to be painted as a mermaid. You know,” Anne added, “she collects turtles. She turned that glorious swimming pool into a turtle pond. We just have a few more sittings. When it’s finished, you must come and see it. Goodness.” Anne patted the side of her cheek. “I forgot the shrimp. Here follow me.”

  When they returned, Henry was standing next to the fireplace, and Louisa, next to him, was speaking quietly. When Eliza and Anne entered the room, Louisa stopped talking, and Henry took a small step back.

  “Where’s Charles?” Anne asked.

  “He’s just run to the car. He thought he might have left the lights on,” Louisa said in a merrier voice than such a message warranted.