Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  At the far south end of the island, Ginny prowled the beach for sand dollars, watching the shifting tide pools as the tide rushed out to sea. She remembered getting on her raft in the sound at about the middle of the island, drifting lazily through the marsh grass past all the piers, gaining speed as the tide picked up, rocketing around the south end of the island finally, right here, jetting out to sea to be knocked back at last by the waves. Ginny remembered the final, absolute panic each time in the rush to the sea, how strong the current was. In this memory she seemed to be always alone. Maria never wanted to do it, Trixie had been too old, off at school or something. But there had been friends every summer. Ginny remembered the Mitchells from Columbia, whose house had been sold five years ago. Johnny Bridgely, her first beau. The Padgetts who always had birthday parties with piñatas. Ginny sat in a tide pool and played with the hermit crabs. The water was so clear you couldn’t tell it was there sometimes. She could feel the sun, already hot on her shoulders, and nothing seemed worth the effort it took.

  At the Lollipop, Mrs. Darcy lay back on a daybed in the big rustic living room, surrounded by children and friends who urged her back each time she attempted to rise.

  “I still think, Mama, that it would be very silly — I repeat, very silly — for you not to let us take you right up to the doctor in Myrtle Beach. Or down to Georgetown if you prefer. But you cannot just ignore an attack like this,” Trixie said.

  “I wonder if this might not be some sort of ploy,” Maria whispered to Mark in the kitchen. “An attention-getting thing. Unconscious, of course.”

  “It’s possible,” Mark said. “Or she might have had a slight stroke.”

  “A stroke!” Maria said. “Do you think so?”

  “No, but it’s possible,” Mark said. Mark got a cup of coffee and went out onto the beach. His nieces, already oiled, lay on their stomachs reading books from their summer book list. His own children were making a castle in the wet sand, farther out.

  “I think I’ll scramble some eggs,” Mrs. Darcy said, but the lady from across the street, Susie Reynolds, jumped up and began doing it for her.

  There was something new about Mrs. Darcy, something ethereal, this morning. Had she had a brush with death? A simple fall? Or what? Why did she refuse to see the doctor? Mrs. Darcy looked absurdly small lying there on the rather large daybed, surrounded by pillows. She still wore the flowered housecoat. Her small fat ankles stuck out at the bottom, the bare feet plump and blue veined, with a splotch or two of old red nail polish on the yellowed toenails. Her arms were folded over her stomach, the hands clasped. Her hair curled white and blonde in all directions, but beneath the wild hair, her wrinkled face had taken on a new, luminous quality, so that it appeared to shine.

  Trixie, looking at her mother, grew more and more annoyed. Trixie remembered her mother’s careful makeup, her conservative dress. Why couldn’t she be reasonable, dress up a little, like the other old ladies out on the beach? Even Margaret, with her martinis and her bossiness, was better than this. Life does go on, Trixie thought.

  Mrs. Darcy smiled suddenly, a beatific smile that traveled the room like a searchlight, directed at no one in particular.

  “She seems a little better, don’t you think?” Mrs. Reynolds said to Trixie from the kitchen door. Mrs. Reynolds brought in the plate of scrambled eggs and toast.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Trixie said. “I’ve been so worried, I just can’t tell.”

  “Well, I think she looks just fine,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I’ll go on back now. Call me if you need me, honey.”

  Mrs. Darcy sat up and began to eat. Maria, book in hand, watched her silently from the wicker armchair. Morning sun came in the glass doors, and a cross breeze ruffled the pages of the magazines on the table. Bill came back for his flippers and mask. The volume of the children rose from the beach. “How do you feel now?” Maria asked carefully.

  Mrs. Darcy’s watery blue eyes seemed to darken in color as she looked at her middle daughter. “When I saw the rainbow,” she said in her soft southern voice, “why, it was the strangest thing! All of a sudden I felt this, this presence, I can’t tell you what it was like, it just filled me up until I was floating. Then I saw him.”

  “Saw who?” Maria put down the book and leaned forward in her chair. In the kitchen, Trixie dropped a coffee cup with a clatter and came to sit at the end of the daybed.

  “Why, I don’t know!” Mrs. Darcy said in a wondering sort of way. “I just don’t know!” She began to eat heartily.

  “Mother, I don’t believe I quite understand,” Maria said calmly. “Do you mean that you saw a stranger, some strange man, on the deck? Or did he come into the house from the front?”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Darcy said airily, waving her fork. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I went out on the porch, I was looking at the rainbow, I felt this overwhelming presence everywhere, oh, I just can’t tell you what it was like! Then I saw him.” She beamed at them. “Trixie, honey, could you bring me some salt?” she asked.

  Trixie rose automatically, but was stopped by the sight of her son Bill standing in the kitchen door, flippers and mask in hand, staring at his grandmother. “Go on down to the beach,” Trixie said to him. “Go!” He went. Trixie got the salt, came back and gave it to her mother who sat placidly munching toast and dropping crumbs all down the front of her housecoat.

  “Could you be a little clearer, Mother?” Maria asked. “I’m still not sure who this man was.”

  “But I don’t know!” Mrs. Darcy said. “Thank you, dear,” she said to Trixie, and sprinkled salt liberally on her eggs. “He had long hair, he wore a long white thing, sort of like Margaret’s dress as a matter of fact, you know the one I mean, and he had the most beautiful blue eyes. He looked at me and stretched out his arms and said, ‘Lolly.’ Just like that, just my name.”

  “Then what?” Maria said.

  “Then I went to him, of course.” Mrs. Darcy finished her breakfast and stood up. “I may have a swim,” she said.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” Trixie said quickly.

  Mrs. Darcy seemed not to hear. Training her new smile upon each of them in turn, she went into her bedroom and softly closed the door. The sisters stared at each other.

  “That beats everything I’ve ever heard!” Trixie said. “You see why I brought up the nursing home?” Under the brown thatch of hair, Trixie’s face looked nearly triumphant, causing Maria to reflect fleetingly upon the strange accident of birth, the fact that if the woman facing her had not happened to be her sister, they would have had nothing in common at all. Nothing! Maria thought.

  “I think we have to proceed very carefully here,” she told Trixie. “Let me go and discuss this with Mark.”

  Trixie went upstairs to lie down, thinking, as she climbed the stairs, that Caswell had been right after all. They should have gone to Sea Island by themselves.

  Ginny had joined the others on the beach, standing with Mark at the water’s edge to watch the children swim.

  “Let me put some of this on your back,” Mark said, holding up a bottle of suntan oil.

  “No, thanks,” Ginny said. “Please. Not any more.”

  Mark put the top back on the bottle. “Well, what happened with Don, then?” he asked. “You want to talk about it?”

  “No,” Ginny said. “I don’t.”

  “Mark, Mark!” Maria came running toward them. She arrived; she told them everything. Ginny began to laugh.

  Bill came dripping up out of the water, followed by the girls. “There’s a real strong undertow,” he yelled to everybody. When they didn’t answer he came closer, pushing the face mask up. “Grandma’s going batty, isn’t she?” he said to his uncle and aunts.

  “Is that true?” the girls demanded. “Is she going to go in a nuthouse?”

  “Of course not,” Ginny said.

  “What’s a nuthouse?” Christy asked.

  Ginny was laughing and laughing.

  “This will take some thought,”
Mark said, pulling at his beard.

  Slowly and daintily, Mrs. Darcy made her way past the whole group of them and stood at the edge of the ocean to adjust her red rubber bathing cap. Her skin was so white that she looked startling among the sun-browned children in the surf. She turned once, waved, before she walked straight out into the waves until they were hip high. Then she raised her hands and dove.

  “You know I don’t believe I’ve ever seen your mother swim before,” Mark said to Maria.

  Maria stood open-mouthed. “She doesn’t,” she finally said. In years past, her mother’s beach routine had never varied: up around nine, a walk perhaps, some shopping, drinks with friends, but never — never — had she actually gone for a swim. Maria burst into tears. “She needs help,” Maria said.

  “Oh, come on,” Ginny said. “We all do. Look, I’ll drive all the kids up to the trampoline for a while, okay?”

  Before them, just beyond the breakers, Mrs. Darcy’s red bathing cap bobbed like a cork in the rise and fall of the waves.

  THREE DAYS PASSED, ALL of them sunny and blue, calm and idyllic. Caswell arrived. The Lollipop settled into the old routine of summers past. Plans were made and carried out, menus planned, groceries were bought and cooked. Caswell and Mark chartered a boat out of Murrell’s Inlet and took Bill fishing. Maria was always amazed at how well Caswell and Mark got along; she couldn’t imagine what they had to say to each other. Trixie’s girls found some nice boys from Charleston to date. Old friends came and went. Margaret took Mrs. Darcy to lunch at Litchfield Plantation. Pop was mentioned often, casually and affectionately, and Mrs. Darcy seemed not to mind. She did not mention the “presence” or the blue-eyed stranger again. She continued to pad about the house in her flip-flops and housecoat, but she showed some interest in the cooking and she played checkers with Christy and Andrew.

  By Thursday morning, Trixie had begun to relax. She thought it was time to interest her mother in Shrink Art. Trixie had brought all the materials with her, and now she unpacked them and brought them into the kitchen and spread them out. The others had gone crabbing up at Huntington Beach State Park. “Now Mother,” Trixie said, “let’s do a little bit of this. It’s really fun, really easy, and you’ll just be amazed at what you can make.”

  “Maybe a little later, dear,” Mrs. Darcy said. Mrs. Darcy sat in a wicker armchair, looking out at the beach.

  “No,” Trixie said firmly. “Now is the time. They’ll be back before long, then we’ll have to make sandwiches. Now look, Mother, all you do is trace designs onto this clear plastic, using these permanent markers. Or you can make your own designs, of course. Then you cut them out and bake them for three minutes and — “

  “Bake them?” Mrs. Darcy echoed faintly.

  “Sure!” Trixie said. “Then they turn into something exactly like stained glass. They’re really lovely. You can make jewelry, Christmas ornaments, whatever. They make lovely Christmas ornaments.”

  “But how would you hang them up?” Mrs. Darcy came to stand beside her daughter at the table.

  “Oh, you punch a little hole before you put them in the oven,” she said. “I’ve got the hole puncher right here.”

  Trixie spread out the plastic sheets, the designs, the permanent pens. She turned the oven on to three hundred degrees. “Okay,” she said. “All set. Which one do you want to try?”

  “Maybe this,” Mrs. Darcy said. She placed a sheet of the clear plastic over a design involving a bunch of tulips stuck into a wooden shoe. Trixie was mildly surprised by the choice, more surprised by her mother’s easy acquiescence. Everything seemed so much better since the weather had cleared. Perhaps things were not so complicated, so serious as they had thought. Still, it was reassuring that Mark and Maria had arranged treatment for Mother, back in Raleigh. A most competent doctor by all accounts, highly recommended. Trixie felt sure that Mother would agree to see him. The teakettle began to whistle. Trixie got up to make the iced tea. This pitcher, old heavy brown pottery, had been at the beach house ever since she could remember. Out of the corner of her eye, Trixie watched Mother biting her tongue a bit and gripping her marker tightly, like a small, pudgy, dutiful child. Trixie added lemon and sugar to the tea.

  “There now,” Mrs. Darcy said, sitting back in the chair, her round wrinkled face rather flushed. She looked at Trixie hopefully. “Now what?”

  “Now you cut it out,” Trixie said, “and punch a hole, and we put it in the oven for three minutes.”

  Mrs. Darcy cut the design out carefully, using some old roundtipped scissors that Trixie had found way back in a kitchen drawer. Trixie took the design from her, somewhat distressed to find that Mother had colored the tulips blue. Still, it would not do to appear disparaging. “This is so pretty, Mother,” Trixie said. “Now you can watch it shrink if you want to.” Mrs. Darcy turned her chair, so that she could peer through the oven’s glass door.

  The kitchen door burst open at that moment and there they were suddenly, all of the rest of them, with two coolers full of scrambling crabs and the children all talking at once.

  “Just leave those on the porch,” Trixie directed. “Go on, take them right back out this instant. Right now. Go on. Bill, what do you mean tracking in here this way? Go take off those shoes on the porch.”

  “Bill fell in, Bill fell in!” Andrew danced up and down, still holding his piece of twine with the rock and the chicken neck tied to the end.

  “You’re so excited, darling,” Maria said.

  “Well, I’m starving.” Still wearing her black bikini, Ginny came barefooted into the kitchen, so that she was the closest one to her mother, the only one who actually saw Mrs. Darcy’s face as she watched her tulips shrink, and shrink, and shrink before her eyes. Ginny stopped, caught in the oddest sensation: it might have been her own face before her, it might have been her own voice that began to scream.

  A FINE DRIZZLE FELL all day Sunday, jeweling the surface of things. They left for hours, it seemed, and their leave-taking took up most of the day. Lolly knew that they had been up far into the night, deciding what to do about her. She realized that she had created a problem by her refusal to leave. But she did not want to leave yet, and she had never created a problem before — not ever, for anyone. So. She remained stubborn and went to bed early, leaving them to deal with her as best they could.

  As they told themselves over and over, the others had to go. There was no question. Caswell had to fly straight up to Washington for a conference. The children’s schools were beginning again, and Trixie had to buy school clothes for the girls. Maria and Mark had faculty meetings, workshops, classes. It was hard to believe that Christy would be in the first grade.

  “Look,” Ginny had surprised them all by saying. “Look, I’ll stick around for a week or so. Okay? You all go on. I’ll bring her back to Raleigh before long.” It was so unlike Ginny to be responsible that Maria had stared at her with considerable interest.

  “I’d like to know why you’re doing this,” Maria said.

  “Why not?” Ginny had answered.

  And they had left, Trixie and Caswell and their large children in the long sleek car, Maria and Mark in their van. Christy and Andrew waved madly from the rear window as long as they stayed in sight. Lolly stood on the rainswept back porch, looking across the road to see the rising mist over the marsh. She traced designs in the drops of water that clung to the sides of the water heater. Each little drop seemed singular and profound, seemed to hold some iridescence of its own, or perhaps it was just the reflection from passing cars.

  “Mama,” Ginny said for the third time. Ginny stood in the kitchen door wearing white slacks, a windbreaker. She looked Lolly in the eye. “Listen, Mama, I’m driving up to Long Beach to have dinner with a friend, okay? The number is by the telephone. I might be back tonight, or I might be back tomorrow. There’s a pizza in the freezer. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Lolly smiled at Ginny and watched her leave too, running lightly down the steps, slamming into her little
car.

  Lolly went back in the house. The silence wrapped her up like soft cotton. She got a Coke from the refrigerator, poured it, and sucked off the foam. She smiled to herself, turned on some lights. After a while she went to the telephone and called Margaret and in a little while Margaret came, bringing the friend she’d told Lolly about.

  This friend was a wealthy widow of their own age, from Norfolk. “The doctor can’t seem to find any explanation for it,” she said. “Some sort of damaged nerve. It’s just this intense pain, right here.” She lifted her forearm so that the heavy bracelets jangled like wind chimes. “Sometimes the pain is so intense I just can’t seem to go out at all. I can’t even get out of bed.”

  “I know,” said Lolly. Her pale eyes darkened and focused; she smiled. “Lie down,” Lolly said, indicating the daybed, and she took the stringy manicured hand of Margaret’s friend in her own soft white ringless fingers.

  “That’s right, dear,” Margaret rasped from the wicker armchair. “Don’t be nervous, dear. This is exactly the way she fixed my shoulder. I was lying just like that on my own chaise longue. The green one. Remarkable. Now just do exactly what Lolly says. Close your eyes, dear. Relax. That’s right. Relax.”

  Later, healed and radiant, Margaret’s friend wanted to pay Lolly, to make some contribution at least to the charity of her choice. Lolly declined, and they all had a glass of sherry.

  “Really, how do you do it?” Margaret’s friend asked. “Really, if you only knew how much money I’ve spent on doctors. Why, I even tried a chiropractor at Virginia Beach.”

  “It’s nothing,” Lolly said.