Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “God, Henry, do you think you can fix it?”

  “I have to. But these problems with the advertisers and editors are not going to get fixed unless I spend a lot of time down there, and every day that this situation goes unresolved, it’s costing us a lot. The sooner we settle these issues, the sooner the paper stops losing money. The paper’s acquisition costs are going to be more than we estimated, but I still think the paper can be turned around by this time next October.”

  Before he left, Henry said, “We need to talk about what we are going to do now that Lawton is back.”

  “I know, but it’s okay. I miss not being with you, but everything seems so fragile for him. And you’re so busy with the paper in New Orleans. Lawton needs as much of your time as you can give him when you’re here.”

  “I guess you’re right, but once we get all this behind us, we should talk about us—about our life together.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE HEAT AND HUMIDITY OF AUGUST CONTINUED TO stretch through September. While Henry traveled to New Orleans each week, Lawton stayed with his grandmother. Henry told Eliza that he had agreed with Issie that she could collect Lawton from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and take him to tennis practices. He reported back that for now that seemed more than enough for her. On two occasions Issie had forgotten Lawton and the school had called Mrs. Heyward. Eliza kept her work in front of her and made progress on her research on Dave. Because Dave was a slave, facts were scarce. There were no records of his birth and death, but there was a consensus among the academic community that he had been born sometime around 1800 and died sometime around 1870. As a slave, he had been sold or traded six or seven times, but even when records were found, nothing was conclusive. The 1850 U.S. Federal Slave Census only mentioned slaves by gender, age, and color—not by name. When Dave was freed after the Civil War, he most likely took the surname of Drake after one of his early owners, but even that information could not be confirmed. Dave had worked over a forty-year period and had made hundreds of pots. Eliza had located twenty-six pieces with inscribed couplets, six more than she had originally understood had existed. From what she could tell, there was a seventeen-year gap from 1840 to 1857 when he wrote nothing on the pots he made except, occasionally, his first name.

  As she was researching Dave, Eliza had begun to think about pursuing her doctorate. The rhythm of life in Charleston had given her time to consider a topic first suggested by her adviser at the Courtauld, the paintings in Tennessee Williams’s plays. The image of the Charleston house painted by both Hopper and Ruellan that had intrigued her at Peter Marshall’s gallery had served as a prompt for her to remember that Williams also had a connection to Hopper. He had mentioned Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad in his description of a scene in his early one-act “This Property Is Condemned.” The more Eliza thought about it, the more she became convinced that Williams’s lyrical sense combined with his visual imagination gave his plays a power that was rare. She wrote her adviser about her idea, and he wrote back that indeed he thought she was onto something and would be happy to assist in any way. By giving her the opportunity to write an article on Williams and Bonnard, he had been leading her to choose a topic that would make use of her master’s in both English and art history. She remembered him saying, “No one has written on this topic. Yet.” He had said yet as if he were dropping a heavy pile of books on the floor. He had even added that if he were forty years younger, he would give serious consideration to this topic. Williams’s standing as a playwright was growing, and yet, so far, no scholar had explored the power of his visual imagination. Eliza thought her monograph on Dave would be finished by the end of the year, and then she could turn to the subject of paintings entangled in Williams’s work.

  BY THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER, THE COOL CRISP AIR OF autumn had begun to tempt the days. Everything began to feel secure and solid again. Henry continued his weekly trips to New Orleans. Issie remained in Charleston and kept to the schedule that she had agreed with Henry. Henry told Eliza that he was relieved that Issie had not pushed for more time with Lawton or lobbied to have him stay with her. Eliza worked long hours during the weekdays and waited for him to return each weekend. At the end of October, Henry told Eliza that the negotiations were getting down to the wire, and he was going to have to spend the next two weeks in New Orleans. On the day he left, he called her from the airport. “I forgot to help Lawton choose a poem for his school’s Poetry Day. He has to pick a poem by Wednesday. Can you help him with it?”

  Eliza said she would be happy to help. She didn’t want to read too much into Henry’s request, but she knew Henry would have already checked with Lawton and that this was what he wanted.

  “ARE YOU ANY CLOSER TO DECIDING WHAT KIND OF DOG YOU would like?” Eliza asked Lawton when he came over after school. “Are Belgian Griffons or Polynesian Pipsqueaks still in the running?” She had finally gotten a smile. “My guess is it’s between a Lab and a golden retriever.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s what I would choose between if I could have a dog. How will you make your decision?”

  “I don’t know. What would you do?”

  “Me? Hmm, I think I would trust that the right dog will come my way and leave it at that.” Eliza asked him about a few unusual dogs she had seen around town—a tan dog that looked like a Weimaraner, a huge white dog that was as large as a Great Dane, a tiny caramel fluffy one that looked like a fox. He identified them as, most likely, a Viszla, a Pyrenees Mountain dog, and a Pomeranian, and filled her in on their temperaments and history.

  “So your dad tells me you have to choose a poem to recite by memory.” Eliza showed him her father’s library. “We have a whole section over here for poetry,” she said. “We should be able to find a poem for you. You know, I had to do something very similar at Ashley Hall. I memorized ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ and I think I still remember the first verse.”

  Lawton looked at Eliza and waited.

  “Okay, let’s see, ‘It was the schooner Hesperus / That sailed the wintry sea; / And the skipper had taken his little daughter / To bear him company.’ That’s all I can remember.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “It’s very sad. The ship is destroyed by a hurricane, and everyone, including the captain and his young daughter, dies.” Eliza shuddered. “So do you have any idea what you might like to do? Hopefully not something so sad. ”

  Lawton shook his head.

  “Well, why don’t we start by looking at a few volumes of poetry.” Eliza got up and looked across the spine of books. “Do you know who Archibald Rutledge was?” She looked over her shoulder at Lawton, who shook his head. “He was the first poet laureate of South Carolina. He was from McClellanville and wrote about hunting and fishing in the Lowcountry.” Eliza pulled down Under the Pines and flipped through it and read, “‘I stood beneath those sounding purple spires / As down the pathway of her solemn light, the moon descended.’ Hmmm, what do you think? Sort of old-fashioned.” Lawton nodded in agreement. Eliza returned the slim volume and continued searching. “How about something by DuBose Heyward? A very distant ancestor of yours. He wrote Porgy and he also wrote The Country Bunny. Have you read that? About the mother bunny who dreams of becoming one of the Easter bunnies but is laughed at by all the other bunnies.”

  “You mean The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes?” Lawton asked.

  “Yes, exactly, that’s the one.”

  “We had to read it in second grade.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was okay.”

  “So shall we see if Mr. Heyward has a suitable poem,” she asked as she opened Carolina Chansons and ran her finger down the list of poems in the table of contents. “How about one on pirates? Let’s see,” she said and turned to the correct page. “‘I stood once where these rows of deep piazzas / Frown on the harbor from their columned pride.’” Eliza closed the thin volume. “Not quite the ticket. I think w
e can do better, don’t you?”

  Lawton nodded and smiled.

  “Here, The Best Loved Poems of the American People. I bet we can find something in this. Come sit next to me.” She patted the seat of the sofa as she sat down. “If I remember correctly,” Eliza said, opening the book, “this book is organized by subject. Let’s turn to the contents and see if any categories interest you.” She shared the open book with Lawton. “The first is ‘Love and Friendship.’” Lawton twisted his mouth into a knot to keep from smiling and shook his head no. “Inspiration.” A lift of shoulders. “Lawton, I need your help—I’m not finding anything titled, “Dogs, Screech Owls, and the Battle of Thermopylae.”

  “I know about the Battle of Thermopylae.”

  “I’m sure you do, but we have to find a poem.”

  “My dad said there’s a famous poem about baseball he thought I would like.”

  “Then let’s see if there’s one on baseball.” Eliza ran her finger quickly down the list. “Here’s one, ‘Casey at the Bat.’”

  “That’s the one. That’s the one my dad told me about.” Lawton bounced up and down on the sofa.

  “Let’s have a look, page two eighty-two by Ernest Lawrence Thayer.” Eliza turned to the poem. “It looks pretty long, Lawton, let’s see, thirteen verses of four lines is how many lines?”

  “Fifty-four, no, fifty-two.”

  “Right. What do you think about that many lines? When is Poetry Day?”

  “November fifteenth.”

  “Okay, so we need a battle plan. You have a little more than two and a half weeks to memorize fifty-two lines, so if you could memorize four each day, two on the walk to school, two on the walk back, you should be more than fine, what do you think?”

  Lawton turned his mouth down and smiled. “I think I can do it.”

  “I’ve got some note cards in the kitchen. You can number them and write two lines on the front and two on the back, and you can take a card each day.” Together they sat at the kitchen table. Eliza dictated, and Lawton wrote the four lines of each stanza on the front and back of each card. “You write just like your father. He must have taught you. You also have your father’s laugh.” Eliza could tell that Lawton was pleased that she had recognized these correspondences. When the thirteenth card was completed, Eliza filled two glasses with ginger ale and ice, and they toasted the end of the task.

  “IT’S A LONG POEM,” ELIZA TOLD HENRY WHEN HE CALLED that night. “But he seems to want to do it. We wrote the lines out on note cards so he can memorize four a day on his way to and from school. So everything here is under control. How are things where you are?”

  “Being an optimist, I will say so-so.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Fifty-something-year-old men who have spent their entire careers at this paper are not interested in anything an owner not much older than their sons has to say. So we’ll see. I should be able to get back late Thursday evening. Want to spend Halloween together?”

  “Do I have to wear a costume?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, then yes. But who’s going to take Lawton trick-or-treating?”

  “The Logans have invited him over for the weekend starting Thursday. There’s no school on Friday. Lawton is in heaven with all those boys—plus they have three springer spaniels. So it works out perfectly. Issie wanted to take him, but he didn’t want to go with her, so this avoids Issie getting upset. Plus I get to spend the weekend with you. And the Mortons invited us to a party Saturday night to celebrate their moving into the Sword Gate House. What do you think?”

  “I thought they were planning to do a lot of work before they moved in?”

  “They did, and it’s done, they had a massive team working on it. I could go either way, I just should respond by tomorrow. We haven’t been out in a while. Might be a nice change from our suppers at your kitchen table—which, by the way, I love—and, if we go, I was hoping you’d wear something decidedly non-Southern.”

  AS THEY ARRIVED AT THE SWORD GATE HOUSE, THEY MET Cal Edwards leaving. He pronounced that the party was in “full throttle.” Two waiters, dressed as Colonial soldiers, stood positioned on either side of the entrance and offered arriving guests glasses of champagne. The brick walkway to the house was lit with candles in glass hurricane lanterns. “Good Lord,” Henry said when he spotted the string quartet, also in period clothing, stationed at the far end of the first-floor piazza. As they approached the house, he said, “Joe used to sit right over there.” He lifted his chin toward the musicians. “Every day. Feels strange for him not to be here.”

  “I remember him handing out candy for Halloween. He never said anything. We were always sort of scared of him.”

  “I guess he was Charleston’s version of Boo Radley. I don’t think I ever saw him beyond the boundaries of this garden,” Henry said, looking around the perimeter. Every time I rode my bike by I would shout ‘Hi, Joe’ and wave. He was always there. And he would always raise his hand in an Indian salute.”

  “Do you know what has happened to him?” Eliza asked.

  “Ross gave him a job and, with no help—I might add—from Historic Charleston, found a small apartment for him at the Sergeant Jasper.”

  As they entered the house, Nina Morton, in an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress, was descending a grand double staircase with Lydia Alston, Louisa Eveleigh, and Virginia Middleton. “Let’s, for the moment, avoid that posse,” Henry said and guided Eliza through the crowded entryway into the dining room. They ran into Randolph Porter, who was exchanging his empty glass of champagne for a full one.

  “Oh, Eliza dear, you are just the person I want to see. There is something—”

  Henry interrupted, “You know, maybe I should have a word with Louisa, she looked as if she might be up to something I should know about. I’ll be right back.”

  “She is here.” Randolph bounced on the balls of his feet.

  “Where?” Eliza asked and looked behind her.

  “Oh, not in here, dear, in the study.”

  “Who?” Eliza asked, fearful he would say Issie.

  “Kit’s portrait, the one you worked on.”

  “Oh God, sorry,” Eliza said, relieved. “I thought you meant someone at this party.”

  “Follow me.”

  Eliza followed Randolph across the large room brimming with guests to a smaller room paneled in dark wood. “There she is.” He pointed to the portrait, hung above a small walnut veneered desk. “I think that lovely Queen Anne desk was Kit’s, too,” Randolph said, with a serving of disapproval.

  Eliza could feel Randolph waiting with expectation, but she caught herself from speaking. Nothing good would come of saying anything. She was surprised Mrs. Vanderhorst had not told her that she had sold the portrait. More than ever, Eliza wished that she had been able to discover the identity of this young woman. On seeing her again, Eliza was struck with how young and hopeful she appeared. This young woman’s safe passage through generations of one family was over. Eliza knew it was silly to think about inanimate objects in such a way, but somehow she felt as if this young woman had been abandoned.

  “Found you,” Henry returned.

  “Look,” Eliza said. “It’s Mrs. Vanderhorst’s portrait.”

  Henry looked quizzically at Eliza. She shrugged to indicate she didn’t want him to ask anything with Randolph present. They were pushed closer to the portrait as a few more people squeezed into the room.

  “God, is it crowded in here. Want to go outside?” Henry said.

  “I’m off in search of more of those mini lobster rolls. Apparently flown down this morning from Maine.” Randolph contorted his face into a mixture of enthusiasm and disdain. “Oh, I do say, the garden is quite something. And the swimming pool, oh my, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Randolph waved his cocktail napkin as he turned to leave.

  “I knew nothing about it,” Eliza said when Randolph was swallowed by the crowd. “I would have thought Mrs. Vanderhorst would
have told me what she had decided.”

  “I am surprised she didn’t tell you, too. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know. I just hope she got a fair price. Do you think I should ask her?”

  Henry paused before he spoke. “No, Eliza, I would leave it. I’m sure it’s not a pleasant subject for her. And you know nothing in this town stays quiet for very long. If there’s too much talk about the portrait, then the Mortons might change their mind and ask Peter to take it back, and that could be the worst outcome for Mrs. Vanderhorst.”

  “I guess you’re right.” There was nothing more to say. “So what was Louisa up to?” Eliza asked.

  “Exactly what I feared. She was planning something for the paper, but my worries were preempted by Nina who had already suggested that the paper do a ‘feature’—her words not mine—on their restoration—and, by the way, from the looks of what the Mortons did to this house, restoration is the wrong word. They should have called it a ‘replacement.’ I haven’t come across one thing that has been restored. An article on an eighteenth-century replacement—it definitely will be a first for the paper.”

  “It’s funny you say that. I only remember this house from when we used to come here trick-or-treating, but I don’t remember that grand double staircase.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t there. There was a very modest staircase in the area where the study is. You couldn’t see it from the front hallway.” Henry took Eliza’s empty glass and gave it to a waiter as he passed by. “What do you say we go outside? There’s a door to the garden down the back hall,” he said, “assuming it’s still there.”