Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  When they left the diner, Henry sent Lawton on ahead with his stack of books to return to the library. Henry walked Eliza to her car. When she turned the key in the ignition, Henry leaned down with his arms braced straight against the roof. “So, Eliza, does this mean you aren’t leaving at the end of this week?”

  “I’m thinking about staying until the end of June.”

  “That’s great—that gives me”—he tapped his fingers—“exactly twenty more days to seduce you.”

  “I think you’ve already done that.”

  Henry laughed and tapped the top of her car as he pushed away and turned to join Lawton at the library.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, ELIZA SPENT THE MORNINGS completing all of the work she had brought with her from London. She mailed the remaining pages of Magritte back to her adviser and did as much as she could on her Williams-Bonnard essay without being able to consult the Bonnard catalogue raisonné. In the afternoons, she worked at the South Carolina Historical Society located in the Fireproof Building on the corner of Meeting and Chalmers streets. She methodically examined the Guignard family papers before turning to the Vanderhorst papers. She read deeds and wills and letters until her eyes ached from the hours she spent deciphering the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century script. She found nothing that referenced Henrietta Johnston or any portrait. So little of Johnston’s life was known, and yet by any standard she had left behind more than most. The soil of the South was filled with unnamed and unknown women who had not gotten a fair chance from life—women like Cornelia, who had never been given much hope for a better life. Eliza admired these women’s quiet dignity as they made do with what they had. She found their strength comforting.

  Each day, she met Henry after work, and they walked to restaurants downtown or drove over to Folly Beach to the cottage where Henry grilled fish. They took Lawton to a few movies and early suppers at Bill’s Grill. For those two weeks, the days stretched out with so much luxury that Eliza felt as if there were spaces between each second. She tried not to think too much about where she was for fear it would all disappear.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE LAWTON WAS LEAVING FOR TENNIS CAMP, he and Henry appeared late one afternoon with a shoe box, a bag of disorganized art supplies, and a two-by-three-foot poster board. Lawton hugged a large book with the title Owls.

  “We need your help,” Henry said.

  Eliza placed the shoe box on the kitchen table and sat down and pulled out a chair for Lawton. She patted the seat. “Here, Lawton, sit here.” She helped him put his large book on the table. She took off the top of the shoe box. Inside she saw a baseball and an unfinished papier-mâché object.

  “Okay, Lawton, what do we have here?” Eliza listened as Lawton described his summer project. He had to choose one animal that lived in South Carolina and make a presentation to his class when they all returned in September. Eliza looked back in the box and lifted out the papier-mâché object that resembled a cross between a garden gnome and an unidentifiable species of rodent. “And this must be the beginnings of your owl?”

  Lawton nodded. “Dad did most of it.”

  Eliza looked at Henry, who was leaning against the wall with one shoulder. He uncrossed his arms to press his hand over his mouth to cover a smile.

  “And the baseball?” Eliza turned back to Lawton.

  “That’s how big its eye would be if a screech owl were our size. See.” Lawton picked the baseball up and held it in front of his eye. “Dad said they can’t move their eyes, just their necks. Like this.” Lawton demonstrated by turning his neck left, then right as far as he could. “But they can make a full circle.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Eliza said, and she looked back in the box. She picked up a feather. “And this?”

  “It’s a screech owl feather. My dad found it for me.”

  Eliza remembered the morning Henry had found this feather. “It’s beautiful.” Eliza reached back in the box and picked up one more feather. “How about this one?”

  “Oh, that’s just from our garden. I think it’s a dove feather. It’s just there to show the difference. See”—Lawton touched the bare side of the owl feather—“it only has vanes on one side.”

  “It’s freezing in here,” Henry said.

  “I know, it is, isn’t it? Cornelia was here this morning, boiling a pot of shrimp, and I think she must have turned the air-conditioning up.”

  Henry stood up and looked behind the door at the control. “No wonder,” he said and adjusted the dial. “It’s set just above arctic chill. How does seventy-two degrees sound? Hey, but now,” Henry said, reaching into the box for the object that looked like nothing more than some strips of newspaper badly orchestrated into a lopsided ball. “Lawton and I are hoping you can help us with our sad little friend.”

  Eliza held her hands out to receive the object. She turned it around and over. “Okay, well, it is a little sad, but we can work with this. Do you have any pictures we could look at?”

  “Oh, yes.” Lawton opened his book to the double-page spread on screech owls.

  Henry held the back of the chair. “Hey, listen, I think I’m going to go home for a bit if the two of you are sure this project will not suffer without my presence. I need to get some things done. I’m meeting tomorrow morning with the president at Citizens and Southern about getting some financing lined up for the paper in New Orleans if we go ahead, and the head of the Coastal Conservation League is coming to see me in the afternoon. He sent me a package on the controversy surrounding the Port Authorities’ request to deepen the harbor. There’s an informal hearing on it next week, and the League wants the support of the paper.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

  “Not yet. There’s no easy answer. I understand both sides. Charleston depends on the port for jobs and has to stay competitive. The conservation groups fight hard against anything that has negative environmental effects, and Charlestonians don’t want any more tourists.”

  For the next two hours, Eliza and Lawton discussed screech owls. Lawton told her how he and his dad had rescued one. It had been hit by a car and had a broken wing, and they took it to the wildlife sanctuary at Charles Towne Landing. “I named him Screechie. Sometimes my dad takes me to visit him. You can come next time if you want to.”

  “I’d like that.” Maybe this wasn’t going to be as difficult as she had feared. Eliza knew Lawton needed time to adjust to her presence. But she needed time, too. She and Henry had made it through the tough parts, and now there was a luxury in enjoying where they were and not rushing to where they wanted to be. She asked Lawton how the dog search was going, and he told her about all the breeds he liked—Australian shepherds, German shepherds, bullmastiffs, Labradors, golden retrievers, Nova Scotia duck tolling retrievers, springer spaniels, and collies.

  By the time Henry returned, Lawton had almost finished painting an eight-inch papier-mâché model of a screech owl with big ears and big eyes. A poster organized with drawings and handwritten screech owl facts lay propped against the kitchen cabinets. Eliza could tell that Henry had taught Lawton how to write by the way he formed his letters. At the bottom of the poster, Eliza had helped Lawton draw a panorama of the marshes and forests where screech owls lived.

  Henry looked closely at the landscape, which was filled with deer, wild turkeys, raccoons, opossums, alligators, herons. “Wow, this is great.”

  “We were inspired by Anne’s mural at Oakhurst. Lawton decided where all the animals should go.”

  “This must be Screechie.” Henry pointed to a small orange bird perched on a branch of a live oak. He examined the papier-mâché model Lawton was painting. “Hey, Lawton, it looks just like Screechie.”

  HENRY DROVE LAWTON TO COLUMBIA FOR TENNIS CAMP AND stopped to call Eliza as he was driving back to Charleston. “How do you feel about me staying with you? There are very few things we haven’t done in this town, but being together in your bedroom is one of them. And if you
say yes, I’ll bring you a present.”

  “Okay, but if I don’t like the present, can I change my mind?”

  “Sure”—he laughed—“but you won’t.”

  “RECOGNIZE THESE?” HENRY ASKED AND HANDED ELIZA A package of light blue airmail envelopes bound with a blue ribbon. He sat back down on the edge of her bed and untied the ribbon.

  “Oh God, yes, I do, those are my letters. I guess I’d forgotten I had written you. I wrote you almost every day.”

  “I used to love to come back home and find a letter from you. So”—he flipped through the uniform stack of envelopes and picked out a few—“here is what you were doing on”—he unfolded the thin blue paper—“a little over ten years ago, on June eleventh, 1980.” Eliza reached to grab her letter, but Henry, in one swift action lifted the letter from her reach with his left hand and grabbed her wrist with his right. He laughed, “Wait, they’re sweet.

  “Dear Henry,

  I am writing this with a flashlight because it was a choice of light or air-conditioning. Remember that great apartment I found to sublet for the summer? Well, one thing the sub-lessor failed to mention was that only one electrical appliance can run at a time, and the choice between the air-conditioning unit in the window or light is easy tonight. I should have been suspicious of a copy editor from The New Yorker named Diana Wingfield, the combination of a huntress and a wilted southern belle should have tipped me off . . .”

  Eliza reached again for her letter, and Henry raised his hand and stood up so she could not reach it. “Just one more, one more, that’s all I ask. On June fourteenth,

  “Dear Henry,

  I have signed up for a life drawing course every Monday evening at the Art Students League. The artist who taught my drawing class at Princeton recommended it, but the instructor here is not nearly as good as he was. The class is a funny mix, a few really gifted artists and then an assortment, including one very wiry girl from Brooklyn who works for a graphic designer and whose favorite expression is c’est la vie, pronounced as if rhyming with ‘zest la sky.’ I don’t have the heart to correct her, and even if I did, I suspect it would not put a dent in her confidence.”

  “Why did you keep them?” she asked him before they fell asleep.

  “What?” he said.

  “My letters.”

  “You’re the one who’s given up collecting, not me.”

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, HENRY RETURNED TO ELIZA’S after work, and as he was wrestling his tie loose, he asked her, “So when are you going to cook dinner for me?”

  “When would you like me to cook dinner for you?”

  He laughed, “You’ve finally learned to play along.” He unbuttoned his top shirt button. “Hey, Eliza, I have to go back to New Orleans for a few days to speak with the owners of the paper. The family who are selling want to meet with me to get my personal commitment about some of the things that are important to them. It’s all spelled out in the contract, but I think it’d be reassuring to them to hear our commitment directly from me. The Porcher family has owned the paper for four generations, but Mr. Porcher is eighty-one, and his two daughters are both married to doctors, and no one is interested in taking over the paper. He is quite unsentimental in that regard, but it is very important to him that no one loses their job.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “We’ll have to, but we’d probably want to keep everyone, even if it weren’t part of the contract. The New Orleans Gazette is well run, and the people there are very loyal. It’s not as if it’s a turnaround situation where you have to make drastic cuts just to keep it viable.” Henry unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up. “Listen, why don’t you come with me.”

  “I need to finish this research before I go back to London. I booked my flight for a week from today.”

  “Back to London? When did you decide that? What about Plan B?”

  “Henry, you know I have to go back. I’ve delayed as long as I possibly can. My adviser is expecting me to work with him at the beginning of next week on the final proofs of the Magritte book. I need to go to the Tate and double-check that I have the right image for the Tennessee Williams poem. I can’t finish the essay until I do that. I’ve got to deal with my flat.” She squeezed the tips of her fingers together. “And I have to see Jamie.”

  “I haven’t asked you when you were going because I didn’t want my question to become a catalyst. There was always this slim chance you might just forget about London.” He reached out and held her forearm. “How long will you be gone?”

  “I’ll be there three or four weeks.”

  “Eliza, stay with me.”

  “I’ve really got to go.”

  “What if I come with you?”

  “I really should do this on my own.”

  “I just don’t want to lose you again.”

  “You aren’t, you won’t. Remember what you said—we both know what we’re doing.”

  ON THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT ELIZA TOLD HENRY, “YOU know, I always thought I might run into you. Not at a wedding, but for some odd reason I always thought—this is going to sound strange—I would see you strolling around a museum, or waiting at a train station, or running to catch a flight at an airport. And I never did, of course. And then I started thinking I would see you after I got married. And I’d have children with me, and they’d be beautifully dressed, and I’d be nicely dressed, too. You know, you see parents traveling with their children tending to their needs—buying them small treats—and watching them while they wait for planes.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. I’d dress nicely just in case I ran into you—isn’t that crazy? I guess, given how far apart we lived and how unconnected our worlds were—it was my only chance.”

  “Come here. Eliza, I will wait for you in any airport if you promise me you will come back. You don’t even have to dress up.”

  Henry walked with her down to the gate. They watched a small child walk the palm of his hands across the long glass window, looking for planes. “Almost forgot,” he said. He pulled an envelope from the back pocket of his jeans. “This is for you. But you can’t open it before you land. Open it the minute the wheels of your plane touch the ground in England.”

  Eliza held her hand out. “Promise,” he said before handing it to her. She nodded. She looked at the envelope and then tucked it into her satchel. Her flight was called to board. Henry kissed Eliza good-bye. She turned to present her passport and ticket. She turned back once more and looked for Henry, but he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHEN ELIZA CLOSED HER EYES, SHE KNEW THAT BACK at Folly Beach, the tide was low, and the sand was gray and hard and stretched forever away from the dunes. Before she fell asleep, she imagined a flock of birds that looked like a necklace of jagged shark teeth thrown up into the sky.

  THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT JOSTLED ELIZA’S ARM. “WE’LL BE landing in twenty minutes. You’ll need to bring your seat up.” Eliza collected herself and sat forward. She sorted out the navy blanket that was tangled around her legs. She couldn’t see anything outside the window except for gray softness. She kept watch until they broke through the cover of clouds, and she could see the ground—rich green patches divided by hedgerows with an order and precision that didn’t exist in America. As they approached Gatwick, Eliza looked down on the uniform rows of terraced Victorian houses, laid out many years ago with respect for simple geometry. She used to look down at all the order, and it would make her feel as if everything was in its place, but now it made her miss all that she had just left—the miles and miles of pine forests and sandy roads, the swamps of tupelo and cypress, the expanses of marsh, the way the water met the sky, and the live oaks with their wide canopies anchoring everything. It was in her heart and underneath her skin, and she could no longer pretend it wasn’t.

  The plane sliced down onto the runway. She reached into her bag and pulled out the envelope Henry had given her. She turned it over twice before prying it open without ripping
the flap. Tucked inside was a slim accordion of paper. A small cast-iron figure of a man, no bigger than a thimble, fell from the envelope onto her lap. She held the figure in her hand. He looked as if he belonged to a childhood board game. A train conductor, perhaps? As best she could in the cramped airplane seat, she laid the eight joined images of a light blue hazy sky and a dark ocean across her lap. Eliza understood. They were photographs Henry had taken from the top of the Morris Island Lighthouse—looking north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest. She joined the two ends of the photographs together to form a cylinder. She opened her hand and looked at the cast iron figure. Of course. She saw now. He was the lighthouse keeper. On the back of this 360-degree panorama, Henry had written, “My dear Eliza, FHIN(2) O(3) TU(3) WY love, Henry.” Eliza puzzled over the coded message. She double-checked inside the envelope to make certain there was nothing more. She folded the images and tucked the little man safely inside a fold and placed the envelope with its contents back in her bag.

  Eliza pulled the note out and looked at the pictures again as she was hurtling toward London in the back of a taxi. She looked for a long time at Henry’s handwriting, as if by staring at “love, Henry,” she would find something more, but she didn’t know what she hoped to find. Maybe she just wanted to hear his voice. But those words were all she needed to steady herself. She wrote the letters of the coded message in different orders on the back of her boarding pass but still could not find their meaning. A block away from her flat, she tucked the note and photographs into the pocket of her jacket.

  Eliza paid the taxi and carried her bag up the two flights of stairs to her flat. She pushed the door open against a mountain of mail. She loved this one-bedroom flat all done up in yellow. It was quiet and cozy. Even on the most miserable gray rainy days, the yellow color of the sitting room made her feel as if the room were warmed by an afternoon sun. Stretched out on the yellow sofa, she had spent hours reading in that room. The bedroom at the back had a large window that looked into the leafy canopy of an ancient sycamore. But it was no longer home—just a place she had loved in London. She looked in the refrigerator to see if she had anything, though she knew she didn’t. She checked the cupboards to see if she had any coffee.