How indeed? But we tried. Our whole life together, Peter’s and mine, was spent trying to live up to one enchanted night in the Carolina Low Country that began with a great armful of white hothouse lilacs—rarer in that place and season than diamonds—and ended with a kiss in the dark on the banks of a creek gauzed with gray moss and burning with moonlight.
On the main, we succeeded pretty well, I think. Sporadically, and at what cost only he and I knew, but there was magic in the marriage of Maude Brundage Gascoigne and Peter Williams Chambliss. There always was. Love and magic; I don’t think the austere people in New Hampshire and Maine that I went to live among ever quite forgave us that. Or, rather, forgave me. In those dark hills they once burned women who made magic. Failing that, they tried other methods of immolation. But I kept the love, and some of the magic too; oh, yes, I did.
Decades later, when the musical A Chorus Line became thunderously popular, I was captivated with a bittersweet little ballad from it, “What I Did for Love.” I hummed and sang it, and asked Darcy to buy me the album, and played it all that summer in the cottage at Retreat.
“Really, Grammaude, that’s a harlot’s song,” she teased. “Well, maybe not a harlot, but a lady who’s definitely been around the block a few times. Not suitable at all for a doyenne. What scandalous thing did you ever do for love? Tell.”
I looked at her, blazing, that summer, in the fire and sun of her own first love. I had no doubt at all about the things she was doing for love, and knew she regretted none of them.
“I will tell you, I think,” I said. “Only you. But not yet. You’re a long way from ready to hear it.”
“Oh, come on. Why not?”
“Because you’re not woman enough yet,” I said.
“And you are?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I will wait,” my red-haired granddaughter said, “with bated breath.” She was laughing at me.
No matter. I would tell her one day, if she turned into the woman I thought she might. There were never any guarantees about that, but she had the raw material for it. If she used what life had dealt her already, I would tell her what I did for love. Of all the women I had ever known in that beautiful place on Penobscot Bay, my granddaughter Darcy Chambliss O’Ryan might, with luck, understand. And understand, too, the power of that love that was born on the banks of Wappoo Creek outside Charleston on a November night in 1922….
The first time I heard his name was when my brother, Kemble, wrote to say he was bringing a Princeton friend home for the Saint Cecilia Ball, and I was to leave the sixteenth dance blank for him.
“Well, he’s got his nerve,” I said to Aurelia, who had brought me the letter at breakfast. I was eating it alone in the kitchen of the old house. My father had already vanished into the autumn swamp with his camera and field notebook, and the dining room had long since been closed off as unheatable and apt to collapse in mid-meal under the centuries-long kiss of dry rot.
“Who got his nerve?” Aurelia said.
“Kemble. He’s bringing some total stranger home for the Saint Cecilia and ordering me to save the sixteenth dance for him. Fat chance.”
Aurelia, gaunt and yellow and gold-toothed and loving, had been born and raised herself in Charleston. She knew as well as any Legaré Street matron or debutante that the sixteenth dance of a Saint Cecilia Ball was reserved by iron tradition for husbands or sweethearts. She also knew Kemble and me as no other living soul did, not even our father, having raised him from toddlerhood and me from infancy after our mother died.
“Like to be a fly on the wall at that dance when you all butt heads,” she said. “That stranger gon’ run all the way back up north, and you ain’t gon’ have nobody to dance that dance with. Prob’ly never will; prob’ly ain’t never gon’ get no husband. Prob’ly live out yo’ life in the swamp.”
Aurelia made no secret of her disapproval at the way my father had raised me, virtually alone in a ramshackle two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house on a long-barren rice plantation on Wappoo Creek, that connected the Stono River to Charleston Harbor just where the Ashley River ran into it. It was a lonely place for a child, though I never minded that. When the first Auguste Gascoigne had cleared the land and planted the rice and built the big house and outbuildings and slave quarters, the swamp forests teemed with wild things that whistled and sang and slithered and screamed and bellowed and splashed; in 1923, when I was seventeen, they still did. But the house had slid gradually into disrepair, and the rice fields that had spawned a great fortune had long since grown over, and the fortune itself had dwindled over the years to barely enough to allow my father, Gus, the last of a long line of Auguste Gascoignes, to feed and clothe and educate Kem and me and pay Aurelia and her husband, Duke, while he immersed himself in the study of the flora and waterfowl of the Low Country like a creature with fins and gills himself. From the time I could toddle I followed him into the swamp. It became, for a long time, my passion too.
Our mother, a small, exquisite girl from a great old Charleston family, had died at my birth, thus fulfilling the prophecy of her grim-faced father that no good would come of her marriage to the last of the ragtaggle band of Gascoignes, and after that Kemble and I saw little of our Brundage relatives. I know they sent money for our schooling, and my father dutifully sent Kemble to McCallie and Princeton and me, miserably, to Ashley Hall for what proved to be an extremely short stay. I ran away so many times he eventually gave up and let me stay home with Aurelia and Duke and spend my days in the swamp forest with a net and a notebook or a sketch pad, or in my battered canoe with a waxed paper packet of sandwiches and a warm Coca-Cola, drifting along the secret black surface of Wappoo Creek reading a book. I had learned to read, early and prodigiously, and I absorbed as by osmosis the classical music he listened to in the evenings on the big Capehart, his one major purchase that I can recall, and when he remembered he tutored me in the long summer evenings and the thick, dark winter ones. By the time I was twelve I had read my way through the library at Belleau, which was substantial and ran to whatever had been popular in the succeeding ages of the Gascoignes; they could never have been accused of being intellectuals. Going into my teens I knew more of Life with a capital L than virtually any other girl child between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, albeit Life with a decidedly treacly, romantic French accent; no one ever thought to take Balzac and De Maupassant away from me. My father taught me some geography when he remembered, and a great deal of natural history and botany and marine biology, and it never bothered anyone, including me, that until I married I could do no sums at all. Aurelia, who had grown up in the great Brundage town house on Tradd Street until her marriage to Duke, at which time the Brundages sent her with their daughter to Belleau, instructed me in the delicate, vicious catechism of Charleston manners and mores with less mercy than any mother would have. Kemble taught me to dance. It was not, on the main, a bad education for that time and place.
But Aurelia considered me headed for a cold swamp-bound spinsterhood and my father culpable of virtual child abuse. I knew few of the chattering flock of Charleston girls who were my peers, and those I did, Ashley Hall classmates and a gaggle of Brundage and Gascoigne cousins, thought I was artless, remote, boring, and tacky in the extreme. Of the boys of Charleston, I knew only my cousins and a few of Kemble’s McCallie friends. They obviously thought the same thing. At seventeen, I had never been out with a boy. I can’t recall minding.
From his first taste of life beyond the river swamp, Kemble knew the twentieth century was his natural habitat. He had dozens of wellborn friends from Mobile to Boston and visited them regularly, learned to play tennis and sail and do the new dances, acquired a taste for gin and cigarettes and politics, and, by the time he was in his third year at Princeton, owned two custom-made suits of evening clothes and several pairs of handmade shoes and a Dunhill cigarette case and lighter. He came home dutifully but briefly a few times a year, had one dinner with our father and me, and spent the other evenings
in town with the Brundage young and their flock, looked thoughtfully at me a few times, and left again. Until the autumn I was seventeen, he never brought anyone home with him to Wappoo Creek.
“He got a name?” Aurelia said that morning in the kitchen.
I looked at the letter again. “Peter Chambliss,” I said. “Peter Williams Chambliss. Of the Boston, Massachusetts, Chamblisses. Which means less than nothing to me and will no doubt remain so. Who does Kemble think he is? First he makes Daddy promise to take me to the stupid Saint Cecilia—I don’t think Pa even remembered he belonged to the Society until old Kemble jumped in with his big feet and stirred everything up—and then he sends me a dress. Without even asking. Just assuming it would fit and I’d love it and that I’d go in the first place.”
“Well,” Aurelia said, pushing pancakes at me, “it do fit. An’ it the prettiest Saint Cecilia dress I ever seen, an’ I seen a lot of ’em, an’ I spec’ you do too love it, if you ain’t too stubborn to say so. An’ you is goin’ to the ball. Yo’ daddy know what’s right, even if he do have to be poked up sometimes. I was fixin’ to get on him about it if Kemble hadn’t. Miss Caroline’s girl goin’ to the Saint Cecilia when the time come, ain’t no two ways about that. Yo’ granma and granpa come out here and git you and take you themselfs, if yo’ daddy don’t. You know that so. Look like you ought to be grateful to Kemble for gittin’ you a dress like that an’ gittin’ you some boy to dance with. If he don’t take care of you, what you think gon’ become of you?”
“Why does anything have to become of me?” I said, cramming pancakes into my mouth. “Nothing’s become of me so far, and I’ve been perfectly happy. If you mean I won’t get married, or whatever, who cares? What’s wrong with staying out here with you and Daddy and…all this? I love this place. I’d rather be here than anywhere else on earth. If you think I want to leave and go live with stupid Buddy L’Engle on Legaré Street, or stupid Tommy Laurence in his stupid town house on stupid Church Street, or with stupid Wenty Sterling in Bedon’s Alley…and go to stupid teas and musicales and join the Historic Preservation Society…and have stupid little Charleston children who are cousins to everybody in town—”
“What else you gon’ do?” she said, and her eyes were worried and angry. “You gon’ stay out here with the coons and the gators after me and yo’ daddy is gone, run wild out in them woods till you eighty? Starve to death, fall and break yo’ bones, lie in the swamp alone till you rot? Who you think gon’ take care of you if you don’t go to them balls and parties and git yo’self a husband?”
“Well, it’s not going to be any stupid Peter Williams Chambliss of the Boston Chamblisses,” I snapped. “I’ll wear the dress and I’ll go to the ball, because Daddy says I have to. But I’m not going to dance with any old Yankee Kemble drags home just to save his own face. Don’t think I don’t know why he’s doing it. I won’t dance the sixteenth dance with him or any other boy. I’ll sit on the side and frown at everybody all night. But I will not dance with that damn Yankee.”
“You sounds just like yo’ mama,” Aurelia said, grinning. “Stubbornest gal I ever did know. Ain’t gon’ go out with no Charleston town boy. Gon’ go out with that boy from out to Wappoo Creek, and she don’t care who say she cain’t.”
“And look where it got her,” I said. I was having no succor from Aurelia or anybody else. Least of all my beautiful, unremembered, never-forgiven mother.
“Where?” she said.
“Dead,” I said, and picked up my package of banana and peanut butter sandwiches and headed out into the morning woods.
One month later, on a still afternoon of sullen gray warmth, a great black Packard touring car with buttoned side curtains and a hood that seemed miles long came wallowing up the pitted gravel drive and stopped in front of the veranda. It was spattered with gray mud from the November rains, and yellow leaves were plastered to its window glass. At the wheel my brother, Kemble, in moss-green tweed, grinned at Aurelia and me; we had hurried to the veranda to see what sort of vehicle could be making such a commotion. Kemble usually came in one of Creighton King’s spartan taxis from the train station.
From the front passenger seat, a long narrow face with a long narrow nose and a shock of pale hair grinned over a car-filling cloud of white lilac branches. The grin was as white as the blossoms, but the rest of the person was invisible behind flowers and foliage. The flowers were like nothing I had ever seen, exotic and impossibly perfect, incompatible with known life. We do not have those great, swelling, spilling trees in the coastal South. The face above the bouquet was as alien as the flowers. We do not have those attenuated, gilded faces in the Low Country, either. They are conceived, cell and matter, beside colder oceans, in sharper air.
Strangeness and something else I could not name, something breath-stopping and near to panic, swamped me. I turned and ran into the house, banging the screen door behind me, and thumped up the stairs to my room. I heard Kemble yelling my name from the veranda steps, and Aurelia screeching at me, and then I heard his voice—Peter’s—for the first time in my life, soft and full of the flat, atonal music of Boston: “Please come back. I promise I’m harmless.”
It sounded like “hamless.” It was, in his accent, a funny word somehow. It made me smile even as I slammed the door to my room, cheeks burning angrily at my own foolishness. It made him seem, indeed, harmless. It made me able to come back downstairs, smiling stiffly, neck and face still hot and red, and put my hand out to him.
It was the first thing I fell in love with, Peter’s voice.
“I’m Peter Chambliss,” he said, “and you can only be Maude. I’m glad to meet you, finally.” He held my hand while he spoke. His was warm and dry and callused across the palm. From sailing, he said later.
“Whut on earth wrong with you?” Aurelia said. “Yo’ comp’ny think you raised like a hog in the woods.”
“I’ve seen ’em scream and faint at the first sight of Peter, but you’re the only one who ever ran like a rabbit, Buckeye,” Kemble said.
He hugged me, smelling of tobacco and aftershave and the rich leather interior of the car. My head came only to his armpit. It was why he called me Buckeye; I was little and round and dark. I hated the nickname.
“What’d you think, that the Yankees were coming to get you?” My brother had been laughing at me all my life, in precisely that tone.
“No,” I said, stringing out the drawl until it was a caricature of all Charleston voices, thick and mindless, “I thought my drawers were about to fall off.”
Aurelia screeched again, a wordless squall of outrage, and my brother stared at me with his mouth open, and Peter Williams Chambliss laughed with unfeigned delight. It was the youngest sound I could ever remember hearing.
It was the second thing I fell in love with, his laugh.
“When it’s time for that,” he said, “I’ll let you know.”
Aurelia screeched again, but it was a mock screech of indulgence and relief. She was as at home with this sort of drawing-room badinage as she was with the sweet, fluting Gullah that the blacks spoke down on Dock Street. This was how it was done; this was the ritual; this faintly sexual parry-and-thrust was the very glue of Charleston society. This long thin outlander was, after all, a gentleman, one of us. Fit for the only daughter of Miss Caroline Brundage of Tradd Street. I thought in that moment, listening to that honeyed screech, that Aurelia had glimpsed the future, hers and mine, and found it secure.
I glimpsed nothing but a pure shining-white void. Belleau and the swamp forest were not in it.
“No,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
This time they all three laughed. I felt a small frisson that was pleasure at a social sally well received, though, as I had never felt it, I did not recognize it then.
“The lilacs are for you, for the dance,” Peter said. He put them into my arms. I could scarcely see over or around them; I saw his face through a dazzle of white petals, through a cloud of sweetness that made my throat
close and my eyes tear. They were wet with the droplets from the old oaks over the driveway, which held the moisture from that morning’s rain.
“Thank you,” I said, thinking that no girl entering her first Saint Cecilia ballroom had ever held such a thing as that bouquet. I would be the talk of Charleston, coming in the company of a Boston Yankee from Princeton University and carrying such an extravagant explosion of alien Yankee flowers. Not the thing, not the thing at all.
Suddenly I loved the idea.
“Every old trout in town will be talking about them, and you too,” I said, smiling at him. “You’ll probably have to marry me and make an honest woman of me without ever laying a finger on me. These flowers will do it by themselves. Poor you.”
My brother still stared at me open-mouthed. What vamping demon had slipped unseen into his unworldly little swamp rabbit of a sister? Aurelia frowned; enough in this vein was enough. Peter lifted his sandy eyebrows. His eyes were, I thought, the clear gray of creek ice.
“Are they…excessive?” he said. “Will they embarrass you? They came from the place in Boston we get all our flowers; my sister, Hermie, had them for her wedding. I brought them all the way down here on the train in a pail of water, with wet cheesecloth over them. But I assure you it won’t hurt my feelings if you’d rather have something…smaller. We’ll call your florist and I’ll run in and get whatever you—”
“No,” I said. “They’re just right. They’re perfect. They’re beautiful. I never smelled anything so heavenly. How on earth did you think of lilacs?”
“Your name,” Peter said. “You know, the old song, ‘Come into the garden, Maude, where the lilacs spread their shade….’ I’ve always liked them best of any flower. We have two huge old trees in Maine, and in June you can smell them for miles.”
“Come on in and let’s have a drink before supper,” Kemble said to Peter Chambliss. “Maudie is no doubt going to vanish upstairs to do mysterious things to her hair and face—at least I hope she is—and I’ll bet anything Dad’s still out in the swamp. Does he even remember tonight’s the Saint Cecilia, Aurelia?”
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