Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  He missed the soul he thought he had.

  Honey in the rock, honey in the rock

  Got to feed God’s children now.”

  When they had finished there was no sound but the gentle bubbling snore from Mrs. Upchurch, and the song seemed to spin on and on. I felt my hands and feet tingle, and my face burn as if I were blushing. It had been inexplicably, incredibly beautiful. Across from me Sophia Bridges seemed as still and empty as someone in a coma. Mark looked from one adult to another, as if waiting for whatever would come next.

  Mrs. Tuesday Upchurch shook herself and came back to us. She hauled herself to her feet and tottered over to Mark and Sophia. She put her bleached, wrinkled old hand on the boy’s head and smiled down at him. He did not move. She picked up Sophia’s limp hand and peered up into her remote face.

  “You remember about Ber Rabbit, girl,” she said softly. “When you born and raised in the briarwood patch, the briars can’t hurt you.”

  Then she turned and shuffled out of the room, through a dusty old velvet curtain hanging in a doorway, and was gone.

  “Auntie needs to sleep now,” Ezra said. “How about I take you all on a little tour of Dayclear, let you meet some of the other old-timers?”

  “We have to go. We’ve stayed much longer than I intended,” Sophia Bridges said abruptly. What was it in her eyes? Not just distaste. Fear? But how could that be?

  She turned to me.

  “Mark has a French lesson at four. We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to make it.”

  I stood, holding out my hand to Ezra.

  “Ezra, please thank your aunt for us,” I said. “It was a wonderful lunch, and we loved the story and the song. I hope—”

  “No,” said Mark Bridges clearly.

  “What?”

  His mother looked at him. We all did.

  “No, I don’t want to go home in the car. I want to go home on the motorcycle,” he said. His voice was a papery whisper, like the wings of a dead wasp.

  “Mark, for heaven’s sake! I’m not about to let you get on that thing; it scared you to death this morning,” Sophia said. “Get your things now.”

  “No. The motorcycle.”

  He did not have a tantrum. He did not cry or beg. He did not even speak again. He merely looked at his mother with all the force of those enormous, extraordinary eyes. They seemed to spill pure, liquid light out into the room.

  “It’ll easily carry three,” Ezra said quietly. “I can wrap you both up in my sweaters and scarves. We can go real, real slow. It hardly makes any noise at all that way. It’ll only take a few minutes, just a little longer than the car would.”

  Mark stared, unblinking, at his mother. His face was suddenly heartbreakingly beautiful. Why had I ever thought it strange?

  She raised her hands and shoulders and dropped them helplessly.

  “All right. Okay. But if you miss your French lesson, you’re going to pay for it yourself, out of your allowance,” she said.

  Without moving at all, his face shone like the young sun. Hers was cold and shuttered. Ezra Upchurch merely smiled, his big, genial wolf’s smile, and left to get warm wraps. Sophia would not look at me. She did not again, that day.

  Luis walked me up the road to the car, carrying the sleeping child in his arms. He put his head into the open window after I had shut the door.

  “You going home now?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Going to have a drink with Mengele?”

  “He’s out of town. Don’t call him that. I asked you not to.”

  “Good,” he said, as if he had not heard me. “You drink too much.”

  “How do you know how much I drink?”

  “I know about you.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Research. I always know my territory.”

  “You’re a tough cookie, aren’t you?” I said.

  “No. If I was a tough cookie I’d be back in Miami practicing pro bono law.”

  “So why are you here?”

  He did not answer. Suddenly, I thought I knew.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re with Ezra; you’re one of his activists, or whatever it is he calls them. That’s why both of you are in Dayclear right now. You knew all about the project before you even came to work for Clay. I could have you fired, Luis Cassells. You’re a mole.”

  He shifted the child in his arms and looked at me levelly.

  “You going to?”

  I shook my head slowly, suddenly so tired I could hardly hold it up.

  “No.”

  “Why not? It’s the only loyal thing to do, Caro. You know you’re going to go along with him in the end.…”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort. I just said I’d think about it. They’re going to redesign everything and get back to me. There’s all kinds of time yet.…”

  “There’s never time,” he said, and pulled his head out of the window, and carried his sleeping granddaughter back down the sandy road toward the house of Ezra Upchurch’s aunt.

  9

  Ever since I was a small child I have had the fancy that, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, time somehow stops. I knew then and know now, of course, that each day wheels past at its appointed pace, but it has never seemed to me that it is real time that passed. That strange, glittering, suspended time seems swung between two realities: it belongs to no sober workaday chronology that I know. It is, in effect, the Washington, D.C., of the calendar year. And so it was with this holiday season. I walked lightly and carefully in that bubble of timelessness and thought neither behind me nor ahead, and was for the interval oddly happy.

  I did not really forget what had happened to the company and more particularly and terrible to Jeremy Fowler, but I found that I could put it away for the nonce. And there was no forgetting the heavy sword that dangled over Dayclear and my island, but I did not have to remember it until after the holidays were over. This gift of suspended time was one of the sweetest and most unanticipated that I have ever received. I was as awed and delighted with it as a child with a wonderful, unexpected present. And for that period I behaved, I believe, more like a child than I have since I was one myself, or my children were. I was sometimes shamefully silly when Carter and Kylie were very young, but the silliness went, as did so much else, with my daughter, down into the sea. Now it was back. I indulged it gratefully. I would, I promised myself, shape up and buckle down to my real life on the second of January.

  I dragged home an enormous Frasier fir tree from the island nursery and put it up in front of the glass windows in the big living room and spent an entire day decorating it with the cartons of ornaments and lights we had stored when I took to having smaller, more understated trees and putting them in the small library that overlooked the back garden. After Kylie I could not seem to bear the thought of those tender, annunciatory lights shining on that black sea. No one had ever mentioned it, but when Clay saw the tree, and when Carter came home from Puerto Rico and first spied it, their faces lit in a way that told me the loss of the big tree had been hurtful. My heart smote me. Selfish; I had never even thought of that.

  And since we had the tree up anyway, I had an open house and asked everybody we’d ever known in the Charleston area, or almost, and was surprised and gratified that almost all of them came. It was an old-fashioned party; I had eggnog and Charleston Light Dragoon Punch and benné seed cake and my grandmother’s fruitcake, and Estelle made divinity and peanut candy, but there was little on my buffet that was sophisticated or clever. Looking over my food list, I saw that I was indeed having a children’s party, and so I moved the time to four in the afternoon and invited the children of my guests, and a great many of them came, too.

  The party was such a success that many people suggested we make it an annual occasion.

  “Of course,” I replied, and “Why not?”

  Next year was so far outside my bubble of now that it need not even be reckoned with. In the meantime, the
assorted children darting and shrieking around the tree and through the living room and out onto the lawn gave our house the air of a Lord & Taylor Christmas window, and that is how I chose to regard it. We had recordings of the traditional carols, and small presents for the children, and there was enough laughter and singing to fill the vast cave of the living room, for once, to its eaves. When dusk fell and the lights of the tree swam in their underwater radiance against the darkening sea and sky, only living children were reflected in my wall of windows. If a small shade joined them, I resolutely did not see.

  I was truly moved to see how much Clay enjoyed the party. I did not realize until I saw him laughing with his guests and their children how quiet he had become, how far into himself he had drawn. I was accustomed to Clay’s going away inside his own head when there was a new project on his drawing board, but only when he emerged into our Christmas world, blinking and smiling, did I see that there had been a quality of somberness, almost of mourning, in his abstraction. Of course there was Jeremy, and the great peril that hung over the company, but I knew this was more, and I knew what it was. But I did not have to deal with it for the time being. It was enough that I had Clay back. I was determined to keep him as long as I could.

  So we became social butterflies, something I, at least, had never been. We went to every party we were asked to; there was hardly a reception or open house or cocktail or dinner party from Georgetown to Beaufort that we did not attend. Sometimes, if the drive was long, we stayed over, either with friends or at an inn. We had done that so seldom in our marriage that it was festive and somehow erotic to me to wake up beside my husband in a pretty eighteenth-century bedroom that was not mine, with breakfast made by someone else waiting for us when we chose to come down. We slept late, ate heartily of shrimp and grits and oysters in every imaginable style and creamed seafood in patty shells and crab cakes according to the receipts of a dozen Charleston grandmothers, and we danced, and we even sang a little when someone played a piano in the late evenings or with the car radio, riding home on the black, deserted roads, with the cold Christmas moon silvering the marshes alongside us. I had not heard Clay sing since we were young marrieds; it simply did not seem to occur to him. He smiled often, now, and laughed outright more than he had in what seemed to me years. Whenever I glanced over at him, at a party or on one of the moon-flooded drives home, I caught him looking at me with something in his eyes that had not been there in a long time.

  I never wanted those suspended days to end.

  On impulse we spent Christmas in Key West, meeting Carter there when he came in from Puerto Rico, and it was an eccentric, sweet, indolent time. I had a heady, sweetheart-of-the-regiment feeling the entire three days, with the two tall blond men on either side of me everywhere I went, and the hot sun beating down on my bare head and shoulders. It was strange and funky and so tropical as to be safe, for there was no shard of Christmases past to sting and cut me. For the past five years, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had been dead times for me. But this one was raffish, excessive, and totally alive. I thought that this would be what we must do each year from now on, though the thought of future Christmases seemed entirely unreal to me.

  In the week between Christmas and New Year’s we went to a party at Hayes and Lucy’s house on Church Street. It had been Hayes’s notion to invite his oldest friends, those who had grown up with him and gone to Virginia with him and Clay, and so we were surrounded with many of the people I had first met even before Clay and I married, the handful of couples who had been my first real “crowd,” and who had remained so until our children started to come and we moved away from one another. Almost everybody came, for everyone loves to visit Charleston, and Hayes had taken a block of rooms at a nearby inn and footed the bill as his Christmas present to his guests. If I wondered how on earth he could afford it, I did not wonder long. Hayes’s finances belonged outside the bubble. Inside there was only room for the funny, lost young Hayes who had brought Clay to me on a hot summer day, out of a blinding glitter of dying sunlight.

  Hayes and Lucy’s house is one of the big old Charleston double houses, which means that it is two rooms wide instead of one, and very long. Its upstairs and downstairs piazzas were hung with garlands of smilax and holly, and tinsel and tiny white Christmas lights studded the crape myrtle trees and the lower branches of the live oaks that hung over the garden. It was a crisp night, too chilly to be outside, but we went out at midnight to sing carols, and the sound of our whiskey-sweet voices climbing into the night sky over the old vine-covered back garden walls of Church Street, and the clouds of frosty breath on which the songs floated, and the yellow flames of candlelight from neighboring windows all made that night as enchanted as if it had fallen in Avalon. I stood in a circle with these people who had been my first friends as a married woman, who had been young with me, our arms around one another’s waists and shoulders, and thought that if I should have to die suddenly, I would not be sorry if it was on a night like this. It was a seductive enough thought to frighten me, and I went back into the house and asked Hayes for another old-fashioned. Looking back, I see that I drank a lot in those days of the bubble, but it was not as it was in other times. I never seemed to get tipsy at all.

  We stayed over with Hayes and Lucy that night, and made hilarious and silent love in their high-ceilinged old guest room, under an embroidered coverlet that had come, Lucy said, with one of her forebears from England in the time of the Lord Proprietors. I think, though, that she exaggerated; Clay and I gave the coverlet a rather muscular workout and it was still intact in all its silky shabbiness in the morning. We laughed a great deal that night, silently, with our hands over our mouths, for our bedroom was just down the hall from Hayes and Lucy’s, and neither of us felt like listening to Hayes’s sly insinuations at breakfast. It was very late when we finally lay still and sliding toward sleep, and Clay said, “I wish this night would never end.”

  I traced my finger along his bare chest. It was slick with cooling sweat.

  “I do, too,” I said, feeling tears prick my eyes and blinking them back. “Oh, I do, too.”

  In all that spangled and fragile country there was one place that I could not go, and that was to the house on the island. I did not even try. I was afraid, and knew it clearly, and knew what I feared: both that in the long, still nights I would hear the laughter and voice of my dead child, and that I would not. The mere thought of sitting alone all night in that darkened living room overlooking the creek—for I knew that I would not sleep—made me break out in a cold sweat at my hairline. One way or another, the island house was haunted for me now.

  Oh, I could go in the daytime for a little while, and did once or twice, but soon I stopped even that. The winter dark came down too soon. The silence that I had so loved waited too breathlessly for sounds that could not come…or could, and bring madness with them. I knew this notion of mine was not rational. I would, I resolved, deal with it as I could with all the other things that bumped like sharks at the aquarium wall of my bubble, after the holidays. But I missed the island, and I found that I missed the ponies and Lita and even Luis Cassells in some unexplored way. So I filled the days that remained to me inside the bubble with activity, from first light to long after dark. I polished silver, washed windows, cleaned out long-neglected closets, took curtains and drapes to be cleaned, attacked the neglected winter garden with a vengeance. It pleased and soothed me, somehow, to feel with my fingers the lares and penates of my marriage and my life with Clay, to tend them, to put them away renewed and shining. I sang as I tended and counted my treasures.

  One morning toward New Year’s I was preparing to leave the nursery with a trunkful of new rose cuttings and ran into Luis Cassells. It was a raw day, with wisps of the morning’s fog still curling among the ocean pines and clinging in heavy droplets to the moss, and he wore a hooded sweatshirt and thick-soled boots caked with the black mud of the marsh. He had two enormous sacks of fertilizer in his big arms, and he grinned ar
ound them when he saw me.

  “Miz Mengele!” he yelled across the parking lot. “Happy holidays to you and yours!”

  Heads turned toward me, and my face reddened. I could feel it. At the same time I felt the corners of my mouth tug upward, and a laugh start low in my throat. He was outrageous and incorrigible, and I had missed him.

  “And to you and yours,” I called back, and went over to the Peacock Plantation pickup truck, where he was storing the fertilizer. “Have you had a good Christmas?”

  “You ask a Jew that?” He laughed. “Oh, hell, what chance does a poor lone Jew have down here? We had an old-fashioned Dayclear Christmas, and that, my lady, is some kind of Christmas indeed. A combination of Southern Baptist and Kwanza and Hanukkah, with a little Anglican and Disneyland thrown in. We cooked and ate for three days, and went to a Christmas Eve watch service and shouted and sang until dawn, and Ezra cooked a wild turkey somebody shot illegally and gave him, and Auntie Tuesday made hoppin’ John and cooked seven thousand pounds of yams, and I made black beans and rice to go with it, and Sophia ordered bagels and lox from the H&H deli in New York for Christmas breakfast, and Lita and Mark threw up three times apiece on Christmas Day. It was totally satisfactory.”

  I lifted my eyebrows.

  “Sophia and Mark?”

  He grinned; with only his face showing under the tight-drawn hood, I thought that he looked like a werewolf.

  “Well, nobody else asked her for Christmas. Ezra thought it was the only neighborly thing to do.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I said, aghast. “I thought surely she’d be going back to New York for the holidays. I should have checked; it’s sort of my job to see that all the office crowd has somewhere to go for holidays. I just got busy, and then we went to Key West…I’ll call her this morning and apologize.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “Looked to me like she had a great time. Oh, she showed up in some kind of suede jumpsuit thing and high-heeled boots that cost more than Auntie’s house, and she still isn’t used to brushing a chicken off wherever she wants to sit down, but she’s learning. She’s learning. She makes careful notes on everything that happens in her little leather Day-Timer, and she’s about to run everybody crazy with that tape recorder and camera, and she still talks about ‘the Gullah experience’ and ‘the oral tradition’ and a pile of shit nobody can understand, but she’s Ezra’s guest and they’re getting used to her, and nobody gets ruffled up about her much anymore. And they love the little boy. He used to cry whenever somebody touched him, and it took him four or five visits to start talking, but he’s jabbering a blue streak now. Lita has taken him under her wing. In another month they’ll both be little Gullah younguns.”