The one aspect of her life that superseded her secret life with Tom Matthews was her concern for her boys. Each of their lives had begun to show specific signs of stress. The nurse at St. George’s School had called the night before to inform her that Sammy had been in the infirmary with a low-grade fever for nearly a week. He complained of a headache, but there was no identifiable cause. The nurse would continue to watch him, she said, and she would keep Mallie informed. Troy, the most outgoing and gregarious child, had stopped wanting to bring friends home and only wanted to spend time at the barn with the horses. David shut himself in his room and drew pictures that he mostly ripped into little pieces. The disruption in her boys’ lives that Mallie so feared as a result of divorce was coming to pass. She so wanted to find a way to help them. Surely, eventually, they would understand and they would be okay.
She turned up the radio full blast in the car. “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie—Drove my Chevy to the levee and the levee was dry.” She swayed her shoulders to the lilt of Don McLean’s voice. “This’ll be the day that I die.” The strange words didn’t matter. She wasn’t really listening to the words anyway. She was alive in the sensuous beat of the music, the stirring she felt from her secret connection to Tom Matthews. Mallie knew that she was driving out Poplar Avenue on her way to the barn to pick up Troy—her adored second son—and yet, she felt as if she were speeding to the edge of the earth where she would willingly careen out of her old life into the arms of a new life with the man she loved.
Chapter Twenty-five
By the beginning of August in 1977, Mallie was sweltering in the high humidity and relentless ninety-five-degree heat of Memphis. It was the first summer she had not driven the boys to Watch Hill in fifteen years. She longed for the cool ocean breeze and the summer life. It further annoyed her that Larry was flying the boys up there to visit his parents for two weeks without her. Not that she necessarily wanted to be there with him, but the thought of the boys and Edie and her friends all together in her adopted summer place—at least, through the years she had come to believe that it was also hers—made her steam with envy. To add to her irritation, Tom, too, was planning to go away on vacation with his wife and children for a week.
When Jenny offered to take Mallie along to visit her sister Elizabeth in the English countryside, Mallie was thrilled. She had not been to England since she was an art student in Italy in 1959, and then only to London for a few days before school began.
Besides paying her own airfare—she could manage that from the remainder of the Christmas gift from her parents—Mallie would have few expenses. They would stay at Jenny’s sister Elizabeth’s house in West Sussex on the southeast coast of England. Mallie had known Elizabeth and her husband Ian from the years when they’d visited Jenny and Webster for the Memphis Cotton Carnival week. She and Larry and all their friends had cavorted through the social festivities with them. She had always liked Elizabeth and Ian.
Jenny’s plan for Mallie included a weekend retreat entitled Summons to Life: The Search for Identity Through the Spiritual at St. James Church in the nearby town of Arundel. The title of the retreat was taken from a book written by Martin Israel, an Anglican priest well-known throughout the British Isles. Mallie had never heard of Martin Israel, but that didn’t matter to her. She trusted Jenny to include her in a worthwhile, perhaps even uplifting, experience. Jenny’s insistence that she go to Callaway Gardens for Faith at Work had proved to be uplifting—although Tom had been right about the impossibility of sustaining the mountaintop aspect of the conference. She knew that she had been spiritually stretched in ways that would never allow her to return to her pre-Faith-at-Work shape—but she had long since come down to earth.
Perhaps the retreat at St. James Church would rekindle the transcendent feelings that she had experienced at Faith at Work. At the very least, she would not be left at home alone for two weeks. Also, the prospect of cool, damp English mornings and the smell of blooming garden roses gave her something to look forward to.
Telling Tom goodbye was difficult. She could not imagine being without his presence in her life for two full weeks. While he was away and she was in England, she couldn’t even write to him and sneak the letters under the door of St. Michael’s. She would keep a journal, a way to share the retreat at St. James when they both returned. Surely, whatever she might learn from studying a book subtitled The Search for Identity Through the Spiritual would offer something meaningful she could share with Tom. Certainly the concept was something she believed she needed—and wanted—for herself.
“I hope you have a wonderful trip, Mallie,” Tom said, holding her shoulders and forcing her to take her burrowed face away from his chest and look at him. “I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you.”
“Praying for you” sounded so cold and detached to Mallie after they had been kissing on the couch—prior to his lifting her to her feet—so completely lacking in the intimacy she had been feeling. Still, she reminded herself that he often said he would pray for her when it was time for the session to end. She rationalized that it was just his way, his ministerial, priestly way, of protecting her when they were apart.
“I’ll pray for you, too,” she said, applying the moment in the Episcopal service when the priest says, “The Lord be with you” and the congregation responds, “And also with you.” After all, he would be traveling, too.
He gave her a small white leather Book of Common Prayer to take with her. Inside was an inscription that read: “For Mallie, in Christ’s love, Tom.” She would treasure it, read it on the airplane, treat it as if a part of him were going with her. “Oh Tom,” she said, “it’s so thoughtful of you.”
He hugged her once again and found her mouth one last time. “Tom,” she whispered, as he pulled away from her. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you.”
“It’s all okay, Mallie.” His voice was soft. He took her face in his hands, his gray-blue eyes holding her as if they were physically connected. “I’ll be here when you get back. Go to England and have a wonderful time.”
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean during the long night flight, the captain interrupted the darkened cabin with an announcement: “Sorry to wake you folks, but I think you’ll want to see the phenomenon of the Northern Lights—the Aurora Borealis—off the left side of the airplane. It’s a bit unusual this time of year, but on all my flights over, I’ve never seen them any more spectacular.”
Mallie roused from her curled-up sleep and lifted the tight little shade next to her window seat. The sight was startling: Niagara Falls in the sky. Waves of white light pouring down from the high heavens, covering the area as far as she could see on both sides of her window. Electric, alive, the shimmering white curtain illuminated the night sky. She felt as if she were the tiniest speck of life, an absolutely inconsequential observer, and yet, here she was, in a front-row seat, watching a show of nature more amazing, more beautiful, than anything she had ever seen. It had to be a good omen, a gift to her from God. She wondered if she could ever paint what she was seeing. No, she could not paint motion. Always she had painted something static: a landscape, a figure patiently holding a pose, or a still life with inanimate fruits and objects. In that moment, the animation, the movement, the light, was what excited her. Surely that was what inspired contemporary artists—Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, for instance. She had been to the Museum of Modern Art and admired their work but had never understood it. She had recently seen the movie about the artist Paul Jenkins, a visual lesson on how he poured paint directly onto the canvas. She was fascinated with the fluidity of the paint as it flowed out of a bucket, but once it was down—like the swirls of paint on Pollock’s canvases—it looked like a mass of meaningless color to her, sometimes beautiful but without meaning. Did the Aurora Borealis have meaning? She was totally captivated by its visual energy. She felt as if she were part of it. That was meaning enough.
Suddenly she wanted to share the Aurora Borealis with someone she
loved. She wished she could share it with Tom. It was too extraordinary, too exciting for her to keep to herself. She thought of her youngest son, David. She wished she could share the phenomenon with her artist son, her nature lover, David. For a fleeting second, she closed her eyes and pictured him with his brothers and his father at the beach in Watch Hill. Larry, drinking beer and cavorting on the beach, Sammy and Troy racing their friends to the float, their strong legs propelling them through the cool blue water, David collecting bucket-loads of sea treasures. She missed her boys. She wondered if they ever gave her a thought. She opened her eyes. The white light was still there, sweeping over the dark sky. The colorful projection of her family experience in Watch Hill faded into a sepia landscape, a portrait of the past.
She lightly poked Jenny on the shoulder. “You’ve got to see this,” she whispered and pushed herself back in the seat for Jenny to lean over her toward the window. More asleep than Mallie had been when the captain spoke, Jenny blinked as if blinded by strobe lights. The two of them, their heads pressed close together against the window, watched silently until Jenny had finally had enough and pulled back into her middle seat, closing her eyes again. Mallie kept a vigil until the vibrant, crystalline light faded into the soft pink hue of dawn.
Chapter Twenty-six
Driving in England proved to be too difficult for Mallie. She had volunteered to be the first to take the wheel out of Gatwick Airport and had promptly blown out a tire, edging too close to a curb on a roundabout. Their rented black Humber Hawk sat wounded on the side of the road while they waited for the rental company to send someone to change the tire.
The accident was not surprising, given Mallie’s sleepless night on the airplane. Still, she felt a pang of inadequacy for her inability to drive properly on the left side of the road. Jenny was her usual understanding, forgiving self, reassuring Mallie that she could easily have done the same thing. It would take time to acclimate to the English way.
Jenny’s sister Elizabeth Carlisle lived in an eighteenth-century brick manor house, surrounded by flower gardens and a sweep of lawn down to the distant shoreline. On first glance, there was a peace about the place that Mallie imagined existed only in old monasteries or convents.
When the massive wooden front doors opened, a small herd of corgis, long, low-to-the-ground, fox-like dogs with no tails and erect ears, and two Jack Russell terriers, short and wiry, bolted out of the house, encircling the newcomers with ardent sniffings and noisy greetings.
“I do hope you like doggies,” Elizabeth said with the slight British accent she had cultivated from living in England for so many years.
Mallie recognized the tall, silver-haired, tweedy figure in the doorway, although Elizabeth looked much older than she had remembered and nothing like Jenny. The sisters had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Elizabeth had married Lord Ian Carlisle, the eldest son of their father’s distant cousin, the Earl of Carlisle. Ian had come to Louisville for Elizabeth’s debut party in 1950, and that was that. A match made in heaven, Jenny said—unlike her ill-fated match with Webster. The British tabloids reported the wedding as “English Royalty Marries American Whiskey Heiress.” The headline had been accurate, though somewhat tacky, according to Jenny. She and Elizabeth were certainly “whiskey heiresses,” thanks to their grandfather’s Kentucky bourbon distillery, and Ian was due to inherit his father’s title as a large English landowner although neither carried a large cash reserve. The girls’ inheritance from their family’s whiskey business, a fact that Jenny had tried to keep more or less under wraps in Memphis, had made both of them independently wealthy women from the age of twenty-one.
“I love dogs!” Mallie said, dropping her bag and reaching to scratch behind the ears of the closest corgi.
Jenny rushed up the stone stairway and threw her arms around Elizabeth. Mallie was instantly envious of the closeness of the sisters. She loved her two sisters but rarely had the opportunity to spend time with them. She had not seen Anne or her younger sister Kye in months. Neither Anne nor her husband was fond of Larry, particularly after Mallie called Anne to tell her about what was going on in her marriage and why she had been so upset on their weekend trip in Florida—the whole story of her discovery of the letters. As geographically close as Atlanta was to Memphis, they did not exchange visits, only Christmas presents, and occasionally telephone calls—usually when someone in the family was ill or got married or died. Anne did send Mallie a large bouquet of flowers after Mallie told her about her separation from Larry. “Because you’re you,” the note on the flowers said, “with love, Anne.”
Her sister Kye, on the other hand, adored Larry and found it hard to believe that Mallie was divorcing him, cutting him out of the family. Born exactly nine months after Mallie’s father returned from the Second World War, Kye had been twelve years old and a junior bridesmaid at the time of her wedding to Larry. He had always brought her presents when he came to court Mallie, mostly boxes of chocolate. Kye had graduated from Briarcliff Junior College several years before and had taken a job as an intern with Mademoiselle in New York. She was the only one of the sisters to take flight from their father’s house and live the independent life of a young professional in the big city. Mallie had tried to explain her separation to Kye without painting Larry red with horns and a tail, but she could tell that her younger sister was refusing to see Larry as anything but a prince. Mallie realized that Kye couldn’t possibly know anything about marriage and children and living in Memphis—about betrayal. Someday when her sister had a family of her own she would understand, Mallie hoped, and maybe they could be friends again.
“Come, come,” Elizabeth said, gesturing to Mallie, then shooing the dogs back into the house. “Leave your things. Jacob will bring them up later.” She put out her hand. “Welcome to Sara-bande House.”
The entrance hall in Sarabande House was larger than Mallie’s living and dining rooms combined. A grand, highly polished, dark wood stairway began in the middle, then rose toward the rear and split at a landing before going up on either side to the second floor. The ceilings were at least fourteen feet high. Open doorways revealed a parlor on one side and a dining room on the other, both highly formal rectangular rooms. Besides the eighteenth-century polished furniture, Mallie could see a pale, worn, Aubusson rug and a double marble fireplace in the parlor. The house was exactly as she had imagined an English country house would be.
She watched Elizabeth sprint up the stairs in her thick-soled, brown suede shoes and cable-stitched knee socks. Mallie had not worn knee socks since Sweet Briar, and then only on walks in the winter. She looked down at her shiny, black leather Pappagallos with their little heels and felt very American and very urban.
“This will be your room, Mallie,” Elizabeth said, striding into a sunny, yellow room with twin beds, plumped up by down comforters. Windows on two sides looked out onto the gardens, one with a lovely round pool in the center, a small bronze sculpture of Pan spouting water in the center. Roses were everywhere.
“What do you call that beautiful red rose?” Mallie asked Elizabeth. She pointed to the brilliant red floribunda blooms highlighting the border gardens on both sides of the pool.
“That’s called Sarabande,” she said. “It blooms from June until November. Actually, the house got its name from that particular rose.”
At dinner that night Elizabeth and Ian anchored both ends of the grand table, with Mallie and Jenny seated on either side. Mallie speculated about whether their dinner parties would seat sixteen or eighteen. She thought she might need a megaphone to be heard without raising her voice. Old lacey linen mats and napkins with heavy English silverware further contrasted her daily use of plastic mats and stainless steel. Her mealtime life with the boys in Memphis had become both casual and rushed. The English scene reminded her of her childhood: the formality of the setting, the servants, the timelessness of the meal. She couldn’t remember a single experience of sitting down to a beautifully set table for dinner with Larr
y and the boys.
“I love Memphis,” Ian said, a broad, brown-tinged, toothy grin on his jowly face. “Haven’t been there in years, sorry to say.”
Mallie instantly recognized the reference to Jenny’s divorce from Webster. She remembered their experiences during Carnival week many years ago.
Like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Memphis Cotton Carnival was a citywide celebration of Memphis on the Mississippi as the cotton capital of the world. Taking Egyptian names from the original Memphis on the Nile, the secret societies were named after Egyptian royalty. Osiris, Ra Met, Memphi. The groups took over hotel ballrooms that served as party headquarters in downtown Memphis for the week. Mallie and Larry had once belonged to Osiris and her parents had belonged to Memphi. Members could refill their glasses before walking from party to party or watching the parades on Main Street. Besides the elaborate floats, every small town high school band from Eastern Arkansas, Northern Mississippi, and Western Tennessee participated with lively brass-heavy music and baton twirlers.
Mallie never got to know the Carlisles well during their visits to Memphis—the Osiris crowd drank heavily and often stayed up dancing until late hours. On the last night of Carnival, they all wore elaborate costumes and the men wore masks. The anonymity of the costumes and the masks gave permission to drink even more. Much of it was a blur.
She did remember seeing Ian in a rabbit costume at the Mad Hatter’s Party one Sunday afternoon at the Polo Club—the final social event of the Cotton Carnival week. By four in the afternoon, when the traditional “men’s leg contest” began, everyone was giddy with gin and tonics or rum and orange juice or champagne cocktails. Mallie remembered seeing Ian tuck his baggy white pants up above his bony knees and, with the long cottony ears flopping over his shoulders, do an English jig. The thought of the dignified, somewhat paunchy, balding Ian, looking like Old King Cole at the end of the table, having behaved with such abandon, made her smile.
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