Anne offered a tray of boiled shrimp with one hand and cocktail napkins with the other. “Do try them, Richard Alston brought them round yesterday. Oh dear, the door, here, Henry, can you pass these around, I’ll be right back.” She shifted the tray into Henry’s arms.
Anne returned with Charlie and Ginny Walker. “Eliza, I heard you were in town.” Charlie kissed her hello. “You look great. This is my wife, Ginny.”
Henry appeared without the shrimp. “Eliza and I were just talking about you. I told her what a great heart doctor you’ve become, and she said the last time she saw you, we were heading out to the jetties to do a little shark fishing.”
“I thought it was Virginia Middleton’s coming-out party,” Charlie said. “I was set up with you. I think I might have had way too much to drink and asked you to drive my car home.”
“I remember that now. I don’t remember your drinking so much, but I do remember your doing a rendition of a 1950s driving manual as you drove me home.”
“Exactly, precisely because I had had so much to drink. You may have thought it was funny, but it was my only hope of getting you home without crashing into something.” Charlie’s voice dropped into a calm monotone, “‘Insert metal key into the ignition. Turn clockwise until a loud noise is heard. Check both the rear and side view mirrors for oncoming traffic or miscellaneous pedestrians. Having established that there are no vehicles or pedestrians, procedures for backing out should begin.’”
Ginny pointed with her thumb to her husband. “He still does it.”
Charlie checked his watch. “We should go, we’re meeting my father for dinner at the Yacht Club. How long are you in town?” he asked Eliza.
“Just for another week and a half.”
“Well, that’s not long enough. But when you come back let us know, we’ll get you down to Fenwick Hall for the weekend.”
He patted Henry on the shoulder and said to Eliza but looked at Henry, “Make sure he takes care of himself.”
When Charlie and Ginny left, Eliza turned to Henry and asked, “Would you mind taking me home?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I forgot to mention that I saw Mrs. Vanderhorst today. Your photograph of Weezie and Billy meant a lot to her. She said she was going to write you. She wants me to help her with an attribution for a portrait she owns. I want to get up early and call a friend of mine who works at the National Portrait Gallery to see if they have anything that would help me.”
“So no dinner?”
“No. Thanks. The jet lag has really hit me.”
“It seems so abrupt.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to be abrupt. I’m just anxious. I have a lot to do.”
When they were out on the street, Eliza asked Henry what Louisa had been telling him by the fireplace.
“I don’t remember. We talked about a lot of things. Probably something about the paper.”
CHAPTER NINE
ELIZA ROSE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING AND SPREAD HER papers out in a line on her bedroom floor—the Magritte manuscript, divided into thirty-page sections with sheets of blue paper, her list of permissions needed, the color photocopy of Bonnard’s Déjeuner, Tennessee Williams’s poem “Garden Scene,” her notes, and her draft essay. Her adviser was doing her a favor to include her essay in his book. He had asked well-established art critics and museum curators and one or two poets to contribute pieces. Having an essay in such a collection would be incredibly helpful in applying for grants or Ph.D. programs. She knew it was her adviser’s way of thanking her for the long hours she had spent on his book about Magritte. She picked up Williams’s poem and read it slowly several times. An unnamed narrator addresses a woman named Aida who leans on a windowsill, waiting and dreaming. A table is set for supper and a cat with “eyes of pale green crystal” watches. The narrator asks her twice, “Aida, when will you speak?” The narrator confesses that against his will, he has failed to arrive at the appointed time for supper and instead waits crouched in the garden, listening to the sounds of the supper party.
Eliza looked at the image of the Bonnard painting. She had read in Williams’s published diaries that he had gone to the Golden Gate Exhibition in 1939. She had checked the Tate’s copy of the Bonnard catalogue raisonné, and this painting was listed as having been exhibited there. A few days before she left London, she had been looking at this poem and the image of Bonnard’s painting at the kitchen table in her flat when Jamie had come over to say good-bye before he left for Scotland. He had forgotten to eat breakfast and was helping himself to a stale baguette and piece of cheese he had found in her refrigerator. “It’s not the right painting,” he had said as he looked casually over her shoulder.
“What do you mean? Of course it is. It’s listed in the catalogue raisonné as having been exhibited at the Golden Gate Exhibition in 1939.”
Jamie shrugged. “But there is no woman leaning on the windowsill, there is no cat, and the couple in this picture are eating lunch.” Jamie pointed to the women with his finger. “They’re not waiting for anybody.”
“Just because they are eating lunch doesn’t mean they’re not waiting. They still could be waiting. Look, there’s an empty chair just to the right of the center of the painting.” Eliza put up a protest, but she knew Jamie was right. Jamie allowed himself to be led by intuition, and he had a rare ability never to second-guess himself.
Eliza reread Williams’s poem and wrote a list of the prominent images—a garden “hung with lanterns like fabulous flowers,” a dress in the color of “thin sunlight reflected,” a cat with eyes of “pale green crystals,” and compared the images to the Bonnard painting. Jamie was right—very little matched, but she disagreed with Jamie about the sense of waiting. This couple could be waiting for someone. Yet there was no getting around the fact that Williams described a woman standing outside a house, leaning with both elbows on the windowsill, looking inside. Eliza reread her essay and considered the question she had written across the top about “the thing that could not be located.” She wanted to find a way to include this idea in her essay. But she would still have to find the right painting. She would have to return to the Tate and consult their four-volume Catalogue Raisonné of Pierre Bonnard. Any picture painted prior to the 1939 Exhibition was a possibility. She would start at 1939 and work backward. Eliza collected her essay along with the photocopy of the Bonnard picture and laid them to the side. Why was she having such a difficult time writing these permissions letters for the Magritte book? She divided the Magritte manuscript into pages she had corrected and those she had not. She got to work and corrected twenty more. She had just started the letter to the head of archives at the Tate, asking for access to their Bonnard archives, when the phone rang. It was Jamie. He was calling from a satellite phone from St. Kilda.
“Eliza darling, I can barely hear you.”
“Jamie? Jamie? Can you hear me now?”
“I’m here with the crew. On St. Kilda’s. It’s fantastic. The weather has been great. We are going to stay an extra week. Eliza? Hello? Hello? Eliza, I can’t hear you, but maybe you can hear me. I know I said I wouldn’t call, but I miss you. I wrote . . .” The phone broke off. She sat by the phone for another thirty minutes in case Jamie called again. When the phone didn’t ring, Eliza felt relieved, but she also felt disloyal. Whatever was happening between her and Henry—it felt wrong to be where she was without Jamie knowing.
Eliza spent the rest of the morning finishing her letter to the Tate and writing the remaining letters to other institutions, asking for permission to reproduce certain images. She tucked her finished one hundred pages of Magritte into a FedEx box. She had an hour to make the first pickup.
Instead of walking up Meeting Street to the post office, Eliza detoured east along the harbor’s edge because she wanted to see Henry. He had mentioned he might be sailing with Lawton in the Yacht Club Regatta. The harbor was filled with small
sailboats that moved like a cluster of butterflies blown about in a strong breeze. A few had yellow or blue sails, but most were white. The sails leaned and dipped and pivoted together in a gentle kind of chaos. Eliza didn’t know what class of boat Henry and Lawton sailed. The tide was almost high and slapped the wall hard as it came in. She continued walking along the Battery toward the Yacht Club. As she neared, she noticed a cluster of fathers with binoculars lining the Battery railing. She turned into the Yacht Club and walked down the long drive to the wide dock. She saw parents chatting with other parents waiting for their children to finish their races. She recognized Louisa, who was arranging a group of children for a photograph, demonstrating how they should hold their ribbons. A man with several cameras hung around his neck stood nearby. Eliza waited for the photo to be shot and then touched Louisa’s shoulder.
“Eliza, hey. Are you sailing?”
“No, I was looking for Henry. Have you seen him?”
“No, but I just got here.” Louisa called to the photographer, “Tim, wait, I want to take a few more.” She turned back to Eliza. “If I see him, I’ll tell him. Will you be around?”
“It’s okay, I’ve got to get to the post office by one.”
Eliza walked past the playground, across Tradd Street, past the pastel-colored townhouses of Rainbow Row. As she reached Elliott Street, she heard her name being called. She turned and saw Henry running up East Bay Street. He waved as he sprinted toward her.
“I’m glad I caught you.” Henry leaned toward her with his arm held against the wall of a row house. He took several deep breaths. “Louisa said you were looking for me.” He pushed his hair crusted with salt away from his face. “Where are you headed?”
“Post office.” Eliza raised the FedEx box and stamped envelopes in her hands.
“Okay, good. You must have gotten a lot of work done.” Henry was breathing hard.
“I did.” Eliza leaned her back against the wall of the house. “Three hundred pages left. Sorry about last night. It was . . . I was . . .”
Henry pulled Eliza toward him. His shirt, strong with the smell of salt, was damp and clung to his chest. “You don’t need to say anything.”
“No, I do. I’ve just got to stop looking for ghosts everywhere. It’s just that a part of this life down here doesn’t seem real—at least for me—sometimes I feel as if it’s going to vanish when I turn around. And the only thing that I know is real and that I will always have is my work. And then I’m with you, and I feel as if everything is going to be okay.”
“Everything is. It’s going to be better than okay.”
“How did you and Lawton do?”
“Lawton and I came in a respectable sixth. ” Henry checked his watch. “Hey, listen. I should go help Lawton put the boat up. I’m taking him to the dinner and awards ceremony tonight. Want to come?”
“I told my mother I would have dinner with her and Ben and Sara. They’re taking Sara to the airport in the morning and then heading back to Middleburg. Ben’s in a panic. His farm manager is threatening to quit, and he needs to get back to see if he can persuade him to stay.”
“Your mother is going, too?”
“She offered to stay here with me, but I told her she should go—she can help Ben with the drive. Anyway, I know she wants to be with him. But tomorrow night is good.”
“Yeah, of course.” Henry started walking, then skipping backward. “So, Eliza, am I right that you just asked me out?”
She pulled her packages close to her chest and nodded her head once. “I did.”
“Major progress,” he said and raised his hand in the air as he twisted forward and sprinted back to the Yacht Club.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING ELIZA HELPED SARA WITH HER last-minute packing and scribbled a hurried list of the places she should try to visit in Italy. Eliza kissed her mother and Ben good-bye and promised she would try to make it up to Middleburg, but they all knew she wouldn’t.
Eliza was rereading what she had written on Williams’s attraction to Bonnard’s painting when Henry called. She had almost finished a first draft. She thought that by discussing these two artists’ shared pursuit of what was physiologically and psychologically real in emotion and image, she had figured out a way to work in the quote about the “the thing that could not be located.” She wondered if the sense of mystery was partly what had fascinated Williams so much with Bonnard’s work—possibly more so than the theatrical composition of his paintings.
“How’s the quota coming?”
“Quota?” Eliza was confused.
“Magritte page count.”
“Oh, good, fine, another fifty pages finished.”
“Great, so two hundred and fifty more to go. And everyone got off okay?”
“They did. Sara, assuming she made her connection, should be boarding an overnight flight to Rome, and Mom and Ben should be arriving in Middleburg anytime now.” Eliza knew that she would feel their absence when she returned home later that evening. Her mother was so happy with Ben, and he adored the way she fussed over him. All that her mother had ever wanted from life was to be happily married to a man who adored her. After her father’s death, Eliza had remembered her mother telling a close friend that she was too young to be a widow. Eliza didn’t know why this came to her now. At the time it had upset her, and she had stayed angry at her mother for weeks.
“So why don’t you come by at six thirty—I’ll show you around, and then we can go to Jasmine’s. It’s a new restaurant on upper Rutledge. My call is coming at five, it shouldn’t last more than an hour and a half. To be safe, maybe we should say seven instead. You can park in one of the reserved spaces just out front. I’ll tell the security guard to expect you. We’re in the same place—on the corner of upper King and Mary—just a couple of blocks up from Reed Brothers.”
IT WAS STILL LIGHT OUTSIDE WHEN ELIZA ARRIVED A FEW minutes late. The night watchman on duty in the lobby of The Charleston Courier saw Eliza coming, got up from his chair, and unlocked the door for her. “You must be Miss Poinsett. Mr. Heyward said to go right on up.”
When the elevator pinged open, Eliza walked past a deserted reception desk, down a corridor into a large room filled with a grid of cubicles. Around the periphery were offices with glass walls. A few people scattered in cubicles were bent over computer keyboards or on the telephone. Eliza stopped at one of the open cubicles. The inhabitant, a young man on the phone, beat his pencil on the edge of his desk, as if playing the drums, and twisted his chair back and forth in rhythm with the beat. Eliza stopped, and he looked up. “Yeah, one sec,” he said to the person on the other end of the phone.
“Is Henry Heyward’s office on this floor?”
“Gotta go. Call you back.” He jumped up from his chair. “Here, let me show you.” He led Eliza thirty feet down the corridor and pointed to the office in the corner, close enough so that he might be seen by the owner of the paper. Eliza thanked him. Henry was sitting in a chair in front of his desk. He rested his elbows on his knees, his tie was loosened and dangling. Across from him sat Elliott Mikell and a young associate of his law firm. They listened and took notes while Henry spoke into a speakerphone placed on a coffee table. Eliza watched for a few minutes until Henry looked up. He directed his voice toward the speaker on the phone. “Could we hold off for a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He opened his door and leaned into the hall. “Hi, I’m glad you’re here. I’m going to be another thirty minutes on this call. Do you mind waiting? Do you want to come in?” Henry looked at her so completely that the balance of everything changed.
“I’ll just wait out here.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “Positive. I’m sure I can find something to read.” Eliza wandered around and found a few back issues of a glossy magazine titled Charleston. She took a seat in a cubicle that was at an oblique angle to Henry’s office. She watched him push his sleeves up past his elbows and resume his pose. He stared intently at the phone placed in th
e middle of the coffee table. The two lawyers sat slouched with their copies of a document on their laps. They listened to the voice on the phone and methodically flipped pages. After a while, Henry spoke. Eliza couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could see how intense he looked. Eliza returned to her copy of Charleston with the picture of azaleas surrounding one of the lakes at Ashley Gardens. At least a third of the magazine had been devoted to memorials to Charles Lowndes, who had inherited and run Ashley Gardens Plantation for over sixty years and who had died last winter at the age of ninety-seven. Eliza flipped past photos of women who had grown up in Charleston, raised their children, and now had traded their Junior League and Garden Club memberships for the hobby of selling real estate. She got up and found a small stack of Lowcountry Life. She skimmed the contents: “How to Make the Perfect Venison Roast,” “Quail Hunting at Bloom Hill Plantation,” “Hip Dysplasia in Sporting Dogs.” Didn’t anyone read about art in this town? Eliza gave up and settled on an article about how to chart hurricanes. When she finished, she glanced up and saw Henry toss his document on the table, put one foot on the edge of the coffee table, and push back in his chair. He seemed to be listening to something far off. He removed his foot and leaned toward the phone and responded. Elliott Mikell and his associate nodded their heads in agreement. Eliza flipped briefly past an article on the raising of a Civil War submarine off the coast of Sullivan’s Island. She had just turned to an article on saltwater fly-fishing when she heard the door to Henry’s office crack open.
Henry was thanking the two men for staying. Elliott Mikell spoke in a voice too quiet to understand, though Eliza did hear Henry respond, “Yes, I’m sure you’re right.” Henry came over to where she was. “I’m just going to show them out. I’ll be right back.”
Eliza returned to her reading until she heard his long stride approaching. Henry peered at her magazine. “Saltwater fly-fishing. Eliza, you amaze me.”
“It was either that or how to garnish the perfect crab casserole.”
Charleston Page 12