But who cares about an internal explanation of your vile behavior for fifteen years other than yourself? Nobody is the answer, and for fifteen years I’d have paid plenty to get that night back. You don’t get them back. I hurt my own kind and was old enough to know better—me, from original Covingdale stock who plain damn didn’t engage that way.
I suppose I was young enough to be foolish too, and the judge’s fall from grace in Charleston felt like my own, and I lashed back. He sacrificed what was his to give up and what was mine too, so we both lost what we’d banked on and worked toward, all gone to satisfy an old man’s delusion. Sixty-five years old and giving up thirty years of rock-solid marriage to a sweet woman with a warm heart who wouldn’t hurt a soul, and for what? For passion? Hell, how often can a man that old pump a head of steam? And why couldn’t he drive a hundred miles to Savannah, where professional women provide ventilation as necessary so the world can continue in God given order?
That is a simplification but effectively begs the greater question. People talked about the marital problems typically underscoring such a detour in a man’s life, and the possible sexual impasse between the judge and his original wife, but putting Annie in the street was just plain damn bad judgment. She was two years older than him and a touch removed from the practicalities. But what could she do, vanish into thin air? Her idiosyncrasy went from a private matter to a public concern, leaving the compassionate resolution of her eccentricity on the street, rendered a public issue, or rather referendum. And on the street—including each and every block of it, the topic of fair or foul was talked numb and no more clarified after than it was before. But the air clouded with her discomfort and shrinking grasp, and that seemed foul.
Of course the focal point of that talk was Annie’s odd tastes, as if they existed in a vacuum with no rhyme nor reason nor similarity to any other oddball behaviors in our quaint little village. Untenable characteristics showing up in your own home were simply not discussed, but this was public and therefore spotlit no less than a cadaver surrounded by bright young aspirants to the healing profession. Trouble compounded when the new wife got on her soapbox to give us what for on the subject of racial justice, when all she knew about the matter was that her leg was better than Annie’s leg, which of course is still conjectural. I think she was more available, which, to an old man is better, but still, the new one was whacked as any leg ever was. She was younger, but not youthful, but then she knew a few kinks, New York style, as it were, and she touched the vital nerve.
That the lovely new couple could no longer live in Charleston was foregone. I, on the other hand, had little choice but to stay. You grow up here, speak the language and live the idiom, you’re not virtually unemployable anywhere else, nor do you need to settle for minimum wage. But moving away requires giving up all you worked for and were born into. Some leave and make out all right, but I’d made my commitment and stuck to it. I imagined a need for redemption, which was my wicked euphemism for revenge. It started with doubt, as I smiled and said thank you to the first few lawyers mumbling condolences to me. What? Condolences? Sorry, they might say. Sorry about what happened. Sorry about your friend. Sorry how things worked out there for you. Sorry to hear about your man there. Sorry.
Doubt thickened and soon grumbled as I realized that the close personal relationship suddenly ended meant more than a loss of a friend. It represented a greater loss generating further speculation on the street. What will Covingdale do now? Bad choice all right. Shot down just like that. You need to know who you bet the farm on, and on and on. That is, my future, including prospects for the bench or the big, juicy clients or a partnership or a shot at the Senate or House of Representatives or for that matter the State House could no longer factor in, without the association of guilt. I’d chosen wrong, been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was judged by the company I’d kept. You can’t get there from where I stood, not to the legal-review contracts the state issues to the chosen bubbas, not to the bench, district or circuit or federal, and sure as hell not to a ballot without a mentor who was himself inextricably intertwined with the original taproot lineage of the original mentors with original roots. My mentor got pulled up by the roots for all to see the rot and fungus apparently present for years. Who could have known the (pardon me) nigger in that woodpile? I was done, disconnected and disenfranchised in a manner of reckoning, done with what had hardly started. Oh, the condolences and sympathies flowed forth, and I was taken in much as an orphan left on a doorstep, an orphan of evidently normal health and stature but strangely stunted yet still a good boy, and we do take care of our own. And so my gratitude was forcibly roused, even as my ears burned with whispering on the breeze: the protégé, the junior legman, the younger stallion …
Then my brain heated up, and I flushed all over, going red in splotches and breaking a sweat for no reason. We went over between six and seven when they’d be at supper, away from the front windows, so no one would be hurt, or seen. That was our rationale, though I for one wished nothing more than to shout from the rooftops my continuing viability as an up and comer. I wanted to be counted still among the Young Turks as a formidable force, not as a formidable joke, which is what a young stallion sounded like. Be careful what you wish for.
I wrote Anne a year after she moved away with her father and the new woman, nothing heartrending but predicable, thoughtful rhapsody on the changes life requires and the fondness for her that I’d cherish forever, and how I missed her and would surely like to know how she’s getting along. I mentioned in passing my regret over the treatment she and her father were made to suffer in those last months. Perhaps I should have included the banshee woman, but that seemed disingenuous, and I, forever the stalwart knight of honor, could have none of that. I remained in my mind undetected, thinking her failure to respond was based on personal difficulty of a different nature. Or maybe she’d found a man.
I wrote again in three years and again in seven more, each time with a bit less of the personal touch but no less warmth and genuine interest in welfare and our renewed relations. I called on the telephone at the end of fifteen years, a few months before the old man died. The new wife practically commanded my presence for tea. I was in New York for a legal conference, so I went. Anyone could see he was dying. They wanted me back every day of the week I was there, to talk, they said, but it was mostly to listen to the old man’s story, like I was Percival receiving the Grail that I’d surely carry home for the enrichment of my people, his people, as though all the lost years and lost love and lost life together had somehow restored me to my rightful and dutiful station as protégé by virtue of time passing. And if greatness had been sacrificed to a greater truth, don’t worry; greater greatness waited in the delivery of the Grail. He spoke. I listened, an older protégé if not a wiser one. I was doing the right thing, I thought. Each day they enticed me with Anne’s imminent return, as if they knew the longing I suffered, just as I suspected theirs. She’d left unexpectedly for Connecticut the day I’d arrived. Business, you know, the old man said.
I repressed my discomforting sense of detection but could not fathom any other reason for her dogged avoidance. I’d been painfully available, me, her childhood pal and ostensible beau and one, true love. I’d already lost her but sustained my delusion till her father’s funeral. I still see and moreover feel the fire in her eyes as she told me her father loved me, not a warm fire but a blowtorch bent on cauterizing the wound between us. I felt it burn to ashes, even as I wondered if she loved me too. She appeared to be done with the love issue, and I could accept that, because I’d committed a mortal sin and deserved the loss for it. I could not accept her denial of forgiveness or any effort to salvage some of the warmth we grew up with. We’d shared a bath and a bed until, for reasons spoken of as beyond our comprehension, we weren’t allowed to. But we did comprehend. We did react to nature and the blessed chemistry drawing beings together, and it was not by chance. I have yet to feel anything so meant to be.
If my harm to her was beyond her comprehension, we could resolve that too, or so I thought. I’d disabused myself long ago on prospects of another bath and bed, or I only deluded myself on that score too, that I’d achieved indifference. God knows I needed a hug, one of the old shaggy dog hugs she was so good at and shared so freely in our youth.
Childcare was commonly exchanged in town, where mothers pursued other interests and filled their schedules with solo outings long before the womanly liberation. We traded families and had surrogate siblings. Anne was mine. My mother had the Azalea Society, the Library Society, the Genealogical Society and the Orchid Club, all of which demanded time, dedication and skill, and were dead serious in their goal of making things nice, so when certain dynamic beacons of light and leadership were asked to stand up at the annual luncheon for recognition and applause, the real meaning and value of the woman would be known and felt. Mother longed for the bridge club too and hoped to become a vital, contributing member, as soon as she had time to practice, so she wouldn’t look so damn dumb but would appear naturally gifted with nuance and subtlety, keeping score and reading cards in her head, don’t you know.
Anne’s mother just needed personal time. She was called Annie and was intimate with Sarah Bernhardt at one time, which is not to suggest your lesbian type of behavior but rather that Annie’s natural affectation was well-suited to the stage and the dramatic types found there, or near there. Annie remained theatrical long after Sarah died, and that whole dramatic sense of things more or less removed her from mothering. She’d fall into fits of tenderness when she’d grab one of us for a melodramatic embrace, then recite lines from some love scene Sarah Bernhardt had played, and we stood still for it, until she’d run out of lines and ad lib till we wouldn’t. Annie spooned over Sarah.
Anne filled in as surrogate wife and mother for her father and me. She wasn’t at all fetched like her mother but was stronger than any girl and strong as most boys and kept up, whatever we did. I had to pee before going to school but wouldn’t pee at home because the throne room at Palace Covingdale was upstairs and down the hall, where mornings filled with thunder and lightning and the foul moods of the dreaded King George, a tyrant indisposed and worse yet, not a morning person. I had to stop at the Warings anyway for Annie and could pee downstairs and then eat the half grapefruit she’d cut and sugared for her father. I can still see her coming down the stairs ready for school, shaking her finger at me but smiling. Her father got the rind. Puberty came between us, because a girl can’t wake up next to a cock-a-doodle-do casual as you please, except of course she could have and me too. But it wasn’t allowed. So we adjusted as kids do, and none of that mattered either.
I made amends with her father before he died by lending a good ear to his history of the world, which was the Lowcountry from the turn of the centuries, 19th to 20th. He mostly harkened back to the years the white preacher referenced with “loving father,” when he would descend on me stealing his breakfast and grumble sincerely as an ogre and rub my head with his knuckles. He waited my arrival at the dinette in his modest but comfortable apartment in New York with two grapefruit halves on that last visit. “Master Arthur,” his voice opened like a heavy door on crusty hinges. “Two lumps!” With an awful laugh he bade me sit, or he’d knuckle-rub my head. At least he didn’t look up my nose, which my friends don’t usually do, but Judge Waring was the first man to point out the impracticality of such obtrusive bristles, saying he had a damn hairbrush didn’t have bristles thick as my nose hair. Or as long. Or sticking so far out a man’s head they didn’t leave anybody any choice what to talk about once that man walked off for another drink or something. Nose hair sticks out like a marquee, says Matinee Today! Nose hair! Now how in hell can a man make the federal bench with nobody able to get past his nose hair? I was past thirty then, maybe about thirty-two or three. Eudora never said anything, and she was in a position at least once every three months to look right up there. But she didn’t matter any more than anything I could have said, because self-defense was unnecessary and stupid. He wanted to help me in a very big way and had plain referenced my nose hair and the role it might play on my way to the federal bench. At home I trimmed the nasal shrubbery and have done so daily ever since.
You might even call me compulsive on the issue now; ears too get a plucking right regular. The point is, he had influence, steering this way and that so I wouldn’t trip over myself on the way to what I wanted most. At least the federal bench was what I was perceived to want and was undoubtedly what everyone wanted for me. What I wanted in actuality I’m still sorting out and hope to figure before too long. Yes, I wanted the federal bench, before I was granted the rest of my life to ponder that loss and come up with something else to want.
In the meanwhile, all was forgiven in New York, or at least set aside. We’d shared some brutal behavior and suffered for it. He gave up his society and so much as pulled the rug on mine, considering he was it, on the professional side anyway. He dashed his hopes, cursing our town to kingdom come in the name of justice, and for what? He left me no choice but to draw a line and show what side I stood on. Maybe a brickbat through his window wasn’t the most compassionate symbol of my gratitude, or maybe it was a reasonable recompense to a young man’s aspiration too. Except of course it wasn’t. For years I convinced myself that nobody could be too sure about it, but then I came to know that anybody unsure was a fool, and there we were.
Unyielding love was a delusion, maybe, but it gave us that last interlude of peace. He looked most dead with less pink in his cheeks than you’d find in an ashtray. He more or less insisted that love and flesh are as one and not to be denied each other any more than you might deny what’s in store for either one, and that’s the fundamental premise of the matrimonial situation, which shouldn’t be confused with lust and flesh, which he also knew from experience. Yes, Your Honor. He rendered judgment of love and life as if from the last bench.
He earned the title King of Tenderloin as a young man, which wasn’t so clever but accurately reflected his pursuits and became the gristle on the street in his early, bachelor years, but then those years were rife with potential; any gristle was chewed with a laugh and a headshake, because a young lawyer on his way to hearth and home and the federal bench fit right in. But you take love, real love, and it doesn’t matter how old the principals get to be, and that same gristle turns to fresh meat, ripped brutally from an imaginary victim, because something didn’t fit right in.
Oh, yes, it must have been the abrupt divorce and remarriage in deference to real love and the few good years a man has left instead of servitude to a false and demanding society of manners. Bah! I think he’d have banged a gavel if he had one handy. Like I say, the old warmth recalled between us may have served his purpose. I don’t know that he died a happy man, yet I’m certain he gained perspective as few in Charleston do.
Anne wouldn’t come around that week I was in New York, nor would she answer my letters between then and the funeral. Obstinate as her father, she clung to personal injury, imagining a greater justice. Who knows what she got? I think I’m over her, perhaps by sheer necessity, but that counts, if the pain accompanying every thought of her is gone, or at least subsides. I can honestly say that I did love her and likely could have loved her for all time, beginning with what I more or less obsessed about, which was sexual relations with her, which would have been for me, I think, the only such pairing precisely described by that abused, overused and most often euphemistic phrase, making love. We bonded prior to adolescence, then turned to love. For me, it never died; but isn’t imbalance the way of most love?
She married a man named Warren soon after that, and soon after their divorce a few years later she killed herself, her terse note explaining poor health and endless fatigue.
Now that I’ve been married and divorced and know better than to try that foolishness again, I wonder what people expect in their rush to the altar. Is it the pronouncement of love with witnesses,
white lace and a high ceiling? What else but such transitory rhapsody would merit sacrifice of the unknown and adventurous side of life? Then the deal sours, and what you get in exchange for mystery and uncertainty is the chance to know someone so well you can’t stand to be in the same room. I would have seen Anne if she’d let me, would have most likely courted and married her and God knows got next to her as often as she’d allow, in time accepting less frequency till we pressed no more and wondered why we chose that path, till wonder atrophied too. Then we’d have gone our separate ways. You live long enough, you repeat yourself. But listen to me; hindsight is the clearest vision, even as you verge myopically on the same abyss.
Maybe I drifted through her thoughts as she wrote her suicide note, but I think not. Soon after the funeral I moved out of my house in town, on Queen Street. I would have sold in a minute, and the market was strong, but I leased it out to avoid the view, review and discussion ad nauseam of the final capitulation to guilt, as Exhibit B in the prosecution’s case for failure to fit in. The simple act of moving out was keenly observed and acutely difficult; college boys more suited to furniture hauling than the arts, sciences or humanities, jostled the furniture with casual aplomb, while the real load was mine to bear. Up and down the stairs on wobbly legs, I trudged under the top-heavy weight of the family burden shifting. I carried on blithely as any task under scrutiny would warrant, cheerfully passing the baton to the next trustee who could begin directly living the life with care and maintenance as those of us before had done for the past three hundred years. I wouldn’t actually seek new tenants for months, but I imagined their presence, eager to take the baton and to learn what I had to tell them, for the company of the thing.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 4