Finbarr slipped from Honoria’s grasp and flung himself at Aunt Olivia. “Finny, you didn’t! Finny, that’s naughty! Honoria, I’m sorry, I’ll make some more cookies.”
“Ha.”
“I can too make cookies.”
“No more butter.”
“Irene.”
“Not asking Miss Irene Utteley for nothing.”
Aunt Olivia leaned forward to whisper to me, “When Honoria calls Irene ‘Miss Utteley’ it means she’s extremely angry. I wonder what Irene’s done now?”
Aunt Mary Desborough went to the window, pulling open the shutter so that a glare of heat struck the room. Her voice was bitter. “Without you, without Utteley money, where would we—”
“Miss Des,” Honoria said. “Hush.”
“It doesn’t make sense!” Aunt Mary Desborough cried to the ocean. “I was happy at Nyssa during the war, and look where it got us! I’ve outlived my time. I ought to be dead.”
Aunt Olivia’s voice was suddenly gentle. “Des. Des, come. Don’t, Des.”
Aunt Mary Desborough slowly closed the shutter.
“Honoria, are we going to have hot bread for lunch?”
“For every question there is a good moment and a bad moment.”
“Honoria, please, for Stella?” She gave me her radiant smile. “Stella knows how to keep Des and me from squabbling, just like Mado.”
“For that, then,” Honoria said, “I will make corndodgers.”
“But corndodgers aren’t—” Aunt Mary Desborough protested.
“Honoria’s corndodgers are. They’re better than biscuits. Honoria, what’s this about the twins’ house?”
Honoria seemed suddenly older, more gaunt. Her voice was dark. “Ronnie went over. The fire burned off the stoop, but that all.”
“But who did it, Honoria? Who would want to burn the twins’ house?”
“There was lightning last night,” Honoria said impassively.
“No, Honoria, that won’t do. Is it because Ronnie’s seeing his patients in the twins’ kitchen?”
“Could be.”
“Stella saw the Riders going up the beach before the storm.”
Honoria thought about this for a moment in silence, then asked, “Miss Stella—the Riders: was they dressed in black or white?”
I tried to remember, and was amazed to find that I couldn’t. My memory of them was more emotional than visual. Whether they had been robed in white or black I could not tell.
“Black?” Aunt Olivia asked.
“Miss Olivia. Miss Des. It better if you don’t say nothing.”
“Not even to Hoadley?” Aunt Olivia asked.
“Not to nobody. Least said, least harm done.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, accepting, on more than one count, the rebuke. “I saw the men riding on the beach before the storm last night, and I asked the great-aunts about them.”
Honoria said nothing. But her silence spoke to me as clearly as words. I thought of Ron mentioning Bluebeard’s closet. Perhaps it had been real warning, rather than questionable humor.
“Stella, lovey,” Aunt Olivia said, “did you say anything to Irene?”
“No.”
“Then we can just keep this between ourselves. Irene gets excited about things.”
Aunt Mary Desborough asked, “You’re not going to tell Hoadley after all?”
“Not if Honoria doesn’t want me to.”
Aunt Mary Desborough held out her hand. “If you’ll give me the letters I’ll give them to Clive to take to the depot this afternoon. Then I’m going out to the garden. There’s work to be done.”
Aunt Olivia and I were left alone in the writing room.
“Oh, Aunt Olivia! Terry tried to prepare me for the family and all its—its ramifications. But I’m vastly confused.” I looked at my fingers, counting my confusions: Ron, with his strange English speech, causing someone to try to burn the twins’ house because he saw patients there; the old Granddam, terrorizing me about the future; the Riders, be they white or be they black; the War Room, unlike Cousin Octavian’s map room an evil room; Belle Zenumin and Jimmy James, and whatever it was which caused Honoria and Clive unbearable pain: five fingers’ worth of confusion, a hand’s worth.
“And well you might be confused, lovey. Southern families like ours—we’re by no means unique, much as some of us would like to think so—are almost Chinese in our ancestor worship. But everything else was taken from us in the war. Who we are is all we have left.” She fingered the silver head of her ebony cane. “I don’t know how much Terry told you, but we do have forebears to be proud of—as well as some to be ashamed of. Our great-grandfather was one of Adams’s early appointees to the Supreme Court. We seem to run to lawyers in the Renier family. Our brother Mark is a lawyer, a fine one, one of the most respected judges who has ever sat on the bench, and for a Charleston lawyer that, my dear, is quite an accolade. And Hoadley is a lawyer, of course. And you’ll meet dear James on Sunday.”
I laughed. “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Aunt Olivia gave what was practically a shriek of pleasure. “Shakespeare! Henry VI, part II.”
“I’m sure that’s right,” I said. “All I remember is that it’s Shakespeare.”
“Stella, Stella, you came just in time. Oh, bless you, bless you.”
I was, as always, uncomfortable with this kind of exuberant gratitude. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Tell me about your great-grandfather. Another Theron?”
“Yes; from Charleston, naturally. Jefferson didn’t even exist in those days, except as a sort of outpost, called Santa Ana. Anyhow, our great-grandfather almost got himself run out of Charleston, because he fought in the courts for the legal rights of free Negroes. Not the kind of thing apt to make him popular, but it is the kind of thing that runs in the family. Of course he’s not highly popular in the Confederate States, but Union children learn about him in their history lessons. I don’t happen to think this is a disgrace, but I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut on the subject. Another of my favorites is Justin Renier; he lived maybe a couple of centuries ago in France, I’m not good about dates, and he was burned at the stake. Sometimes it strikes me as our only safety, that we have a saint in the family, though I’m too Occidental and too Huguenot to pray to an ancestor, even an oblique one. Of course, being a priest, he had no direct descendants—or if he did, we don’t know about them. You name me one great family which has no descendants of the left hand, as it were, and I’ll—I’ll swim the Atlantic tonight. Or am I making excuses for us? Here in the South it’s more complicated being in the left hand than it is in Europe, because there’s usually a touch of the tar brush.”
“The what?”
“You British have the same problem in a small way with your Eurasians, don’t you?”
I really didn’t know, except through gossip.
“Don’t let it all overwhelm you, lovey. Remember, Mado went through the same thing. Tout ça change, tout c’est la même chose.” I must have looked doubtful, for she said, “I know it must seem different to you; Mado did have her Theron with her. And she had Nyssa.”
“Nyssa seems so important to everybody, and Terry did mention it, but I don’t really understand.”
“Of course not. Practically nobody understood Nyssa. The plantation came to our cousin James when he was twenty-one, from his maternal grandmother. If everybody in the South had done what James did with Nyssa we might never have had a war. Nyssa was an experiment in a kind of freedom most people couldn’t understand—that was why they were suspicious of it—and of us. And even if Nyssa failed—no! Who knows, really, what failure is? Nyssa was a community where we all lived and worked together as a family. James freed all the slaves when he left Charleston and went to live at Nyssa, and the ones who stayed—and many of them did—stayed because they wanted to, of their own free will, not because of fear, or because any pressure was put on them. James has two sisters, you’ll meet them tomorrow,
but let’s not talk about Lucille before we have to. I can’t stand her, never could. Xenia went to Nyssa with James and did all the—I suppose you’d call it administrative work. Clive got his education in Xenia’s school; he was born at Nyssa so he’s always been one of us, because we share the same memories of places and people. I believed in God until Nyssa was burned. We were always joyful there, even in the midst of war, of horror, because we were together.”
“Honoria, too?”
“Oh, no. Honoria was in Illyria all during the war. She was alone most of the time—Broadley was dead by then. She’d have been killed if she’d been anywhere but Illyria. The twins and the Captain and some of the little people of the scrub brought her food, though the scrub people were afraid of her because—well, all the herb teas she makes, and the kinds of poultices she uses for my joints—all the wisdom she brought with her from Africa. Sometimes I wonder how much Honoria remembers of Africa? More than she says. And I think she misses it. She learned English from Broadley’s slaves, and sometimes she comes out with a touch of Mado, but that funny guttural sound of Kairogi comes out in her voice whenever she’s moved. It’s a little like Gullah, but more—more austere. Funny: if it hadn’t been for that beast Broadley she’d never have met Mado, and she wouldn’t have wanted to miss that friendship. Or, all things considered, would she? I don’t imagine Honoria would mind in the least giving up the things of civilization, but I don’t think she’d want to lose the wisdom she’s learned. The question I ask myself is this: is it the wisdom of civilization? I’m not sure. But I think it’s a kind of wisdom she wouldn’t have learned in Kairogi. Clive has it. Mado had it. It is more to be desired than gold.”
“Do you have it?” I asked.
Aunt Olivia’s face lost the youthful animation that lit it when she talked. Her eyes looked bleak and old. “I? I am a fool.”
4
After coffee that night I excused myself from the veranda, promising that I would not take as long a walk as the night before. But I made it clear, I hoped, that I needed time alone, that I would be gone more than a few minutes. With the realistic ruthlessness of youth I simply removed myself from my husband’s family and set off up the beach.
There had been a brief thundershower—no more than a few minutes—during dinner, and the atmosphere had lifted. Beneath my feet I saw a delicate bubbling, bent down and plunged my fingers in wet sand and came up with a handful of sand and tiny shells. I let the sand sift through my fingers until I could see the shells clearly, rainbow-hued and no bigger than my little fingernail: donax, just as Clive had described them. I held them in my open palm, not knowing what to do with them—I certainly did not have enough for soup—and finally put them back down on the sand, where they were immediately sucked in, and fresh bubbles appeared.
I walked on, along the water’s edge. This evening there was a brilliance to the air, so sparkling that I could feel it against my skin, a touch totally different from the oppression of the night before. It was also considerably later, for we had lingered over dinner and coffee. The moon was already up, and above me the stars were coming out in profusion, stars curving down to tip into the black rim of sea, the curved plumed hills of dunes, stars in and among the dunes—
I ran across the beach: fireflies, a festivity of fireflies. I held my hands out to cup one as Ron had done the night before, remembering also Terry telling me about running on the beach with a preserving jar when he was a little boy, catching fireflies to make a lantern. ‘But then I would always let them go,’ he told me. ‘I tried one night taking them up to my bedroom to keep me company and light my dreams, but they wouldn’t shine for me there.’
I lay down in the gentle curve of a dune and looked up at the soft velvet of sky, very different in texture from the English skies. I lay quietly under the calm of stars, then closed my eyes and listened to the sea, the wind moving in the beach grasses, the salty, fragrant odor of the vines clinging to the sand. I opened my eyes and the whole sky was slightly tilted, at a different angle from the summer sky in Oxford. I felt a moment’s dizziness as though the earth had shifted on its axis.
I sniffed. Sniffed again: it was the odd, herbal odor which had accompanied Belle Zenumin.
She appeared from behind a clump of palms, a beautiful silhouette against the sky. “Mrs. Renier, I hope I didn’t startle you.” She dropped lightly to the sand beside me.
“Belle!”
“I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to see you tonight, and Granddam said you’d be walking on the beach again, and later than last night, so I presumed to come.”
I sifted sand through my fingers and said nothing.
“Mrs. Renier, ma’am, did you find your shoes and stockings?”
I looked up. “Yes, thank you. The twins found them and brought them to me.”
In the starlight I could see a frown move across her face like a cloud. Then she gave her clear laugh, like glass bells blowing in the wind. “The twins—magic, ain’t they, with numbers? How you suppose they do it? Suppose it’s like my Granddam? Just knowing things other people can’t know, out of the stars, like?”
“Astronomers do have to be mathematicians.” I deliberately misunderstood. I did not want to talk about the Granddam.
Belle put one of her slender dark hands, devoid of rings, down on the pale sand. “That not how the twins do it, nor my Granddam, neither. Mrs. Renier, did she scare you right bad? That what I wanted to see you about tonight.” I shook my head in a negation that was a lie. “If you’d come with me and see her again, Mrs. Renier, ma’am. I don’t want to discommode you, but it not good to make the Granddam an-angered, to have her turn her powers against you. I think if you would come—”
I fought down panic. “Not tonight, please, Belle, I’m very tired, and everybody was cross because I was gone so long last night.”
“Oh, not tonight, ma’am. But in the daytime, when you can see the beautiful waters of the creek winding into the scrub. The creek’s black from cypress root, smooth as glass, full of flowers and birds—you will love it, Mrs. Renier, ma’am. You will come?” She leaned towards me, awaiting my reply.
“Yes, but I don’t want her to read my palm or tell my fortune—”
She touched my hand comfortingly. “Nothing you don’t want, Mrs. Renier, ma’am. Belle be sorry. It were meant to be a gift. But iffen it not pleasing to you … It just be good if you make my Granddam understand you wasn’t slapping away her gift. Belle understand, but Granddam be an old woman.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” I said. “Truly.”
“Oh, I know you didn’t, Mrs. Renier, ma’am. You be good and kind. And we friends. So I make bold to ask—Mrs. Renier, people been talking to you about my Ronnie?”
“No. But I’ve talked to him. I like him. And I’m sure he’s an excellent doctor.”
“But people been talking, ain’t they?” She reached her hands anxiously towards me.
“Not really, not much.”
“There’s something I want to tell you about my Ronnie before anybody else—” She sighed, slowly, deeply. “It be hard on a young girl, growing up back in the dark of the scrub, coming out maybe once or twice a year. It be hard to live in the dark and be young and full of life, and knowing nothing about the world outside, knowing nothing about men. I didn’t even know they was white folks like you till I was a grown girl. Whites in the scrub, they not like you, and they don’t mix with Zenumins. Scared. I was kept in our own clearing. Nobody come in who don’t stay in. Once in, don’t go out.” She took my hand, my ring hand, in both of hers, and held it tight, whispering. “This be hard to say. I didn’t think it was going to be so hard.”
I returned the pressure of her fingers. “It’s all right, Belle. Don’t be afraid to say it. Go ahead and tell me, whatever it is.” I was proud to have her confidence.
“Mrs. Renier, ma’am, Miss Stella, people going to talk to you about Ronnie. Someone, sooner or later, someone going to tell you Mr. Hoadley be Ronnie’s pap
py. Don’t you pay them no mind. Ain’t true.”
If my words earlier that day had turned Honoria and Clive to stone, so Belle’s words struck me. “Uncle Hoad—”
“Ain’t true, Miss Stella. Don’t you listen to nobody. Mr. Hoadley and I, we never. Not once. Maybe Mr. Hoadley might have wanted to—I was right beautiful—but he never. He a man of honor.”
I asked in consternation, “But why would anybody say that Uncle Hoadley—”
“Miss Stella, you seen Ron. You seen he got a white man’s education. How you think a nigger get to go to England to school? How you think a nigger go on after school and study for to be a doctor?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought—”
She released my hand and lay back on the dune, looking up at the sky where the stars bloomed, thick as daisies in the spring. “What happen if you think?”
I, too, lay back. The moon looked down at us with impersonal clarity. “I suppose—I suppose somebody would have to send him, would have to pay for it.”
She reached out and caught a firefly, but instead of releasing it as Ron James had done, in her tension she crushed it, then wiped her fingers on the sand. “Why would anybody take a twelve-year-old black boy and send him across the ocean to a biggety school?”
“My cousins at home—the Dowlers—saw to it that a number of deserving young men were educated.”
“For why?”
“Why? Because the boys deserved it, and the Dowlers were interested.”
“For why?”
“Well—it matters, doesn’t it, that people should be educated? And if—if people can do something about it, isn’t that their responsibility?”
“These be black boys your kin send to school?”
“No. But we—we don’t have many Negroes in England.”
“It make a difference, Miss Stella, leastways around here. No one aiming to educate a nigger out of the goodness of his heart. White folk don’t want niggers educated. If a white man send a black boy to school, got to be a reason behind it.”
The Other Side of the Sun Page 13