In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  You can’t recall a gray day of fractious recollection like that without seeing the life once lived and sorely missed. Hardly a pulse remained in him, yet the slogging blood could not restrain the passion that surged like a last flood bucking a cold breeze from up the river. He said he couldn’t tell what happened all those years in Charleston socially, except for sipping scotch from one garden to the next, agreeing on a particularly appealing shrub, a unique arrangement of flowers, a crumbling edifice, new blooms, an apparent ambition or a notable humility, a new arrival in town with apparent charm and the manners to match. These and other trivialities were the stuff of life, serving as background and context to interpreting the law, so the building blocks of society could rise in a warm and orderly atmosphere, not with an air of detachment but in service to the root core of society, which was us. His wry, possibly vague implication was that right and wrong were as accurately discerned in Charleston as in Timbuktu, meaning the town and its residents and all who came before were in reality illegal.

  “So it damn well didn’t matter whose garden it was, because it all comprised those delusions of grandeur and blissful ignorance commonly suffered by criminals, especially those incarcerated behind high, masonry walls. Just go to the federal slammer and see for yourself. Ha! The temperate weather; well, that just made the delusion more sensible. We had it good, better than anybody ever had, or at least better than anybody we’d ever heard of. The special feeling was Southern cordiality over the rocks that made for a bland and pleasant inebriation facilitating the passing of time. Those of us in control assured the status quo for the rest of the, shall we say chosen few, born into it. None of that accident of birth talk around there; we wouldn’t have chosen anywhere else, not even anywhere in the South, because Charleston was so cultured.”

  He needed not condescend to me in this way but rambled on with feigned humility, as if this was not his interpretation of things but a historical record, to be sure. “See that hutch. That’s what it comes down to. Not … that hutch, but the …

  “No place in the history of the world has offered a greater collection of inanimate objects to adorn such a vast poverty of imagination. The gardens and scotches and how-you-doings, the arcane expectation derived from the accident of birth, all of it cut from the same cloth. The glorious past. We were raised to it. It fits, that old feeling. You never outgrow it, until one day you do, if you’re lucky. Sure, it was a terrific place to live in, I guess, because you never had to judge a man by the cut of his jib, until the day you realize you’d been judging all along and couldn’t have been more wrong about it. Ignorance is bliss, and I was a happy man too. You too, I suspect. Still are, maybe.”

  I’d sat nodding mindlessly till then but stopped short of agreeing with him that he and his and me and mine and everything in between was illegitimate, illegal and morally wrong. Maybe he read my hesitation; he didn’t dote on it but hearkened on back to recollections of young women by name and brief description, responding, I think, to the exhumed indictment of decades past, King of the Tenderloin. It was a nickname in great good humor, a well-intentioned come-uppance toward an up-and-comer, a mover and shaker with youthful vigor and Broad Street connections, though such a profile seems oxymoronic in perspective. Nothing moved on Broad Street but the heat ripples; nothing shook the place but the earthquakes every hundred years or so, leaving rearranging to the hurricanes, so the folks could continue as they had done. King of the Tenderloin wasn’t exactly over the top but eased up to it, considering the fairer-sexed virtues at risk, most of whom had daddies and brothers and matrimonial prospects to factor. Cracking a horrible grin, he remembered the harmlessness of young lust—or lust at any age for that matter, because a man is not naturally celibate but in fact considers the human vagina what, once every seven minutes or something?

  I glanced at my watch.

  “That doesn’t make him evil, which is what every normal man knows and any man will admit to in private.”

  I’d had no sexual relations in six years, give or take seven minutes, but I saw his point, though it seemed tortuous and self-serving. I didn’t object, because he wrung his hands, squeezing blood to his face so it could open on his scornful voice: “King of the Tenderloin.” I winced at the crusty derision twisting his grimace and felt certain we approached the meat of the matter. “Young buck is all it was. All the fellows had names. Rube, Wop, Duke, Slicky. Didn’t mean a thing.”

  She entered again, holding her finger in a paperback copy of Cry the Beloved Country, cheerfully ready to serve up further proof of salvation, like a missionary complacently satisfied that the Truth is irrefutable because it’s written right here. She left me no choice. “King of the Tenderloin,” I repeated, twisting the knife for her benefit.

  “I love the developing cultures,” she ignored me, her great big shrillness somehow amplified from her own withered posture. “You can just see them taking form. We’ve talked about a trip to Africa. Maybe next spring.” He nodded or maybe only succumbed to a palsied twitch. She left.

  The wind howled and blew the rain away. “Blackberry winter came last week,” he told the window. “Or maybe this week. I can hear them sustaining each other with the weather forecast and analysis.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes. They’ll be agreeing right now, as we speak, that home is where you want to be, wiping their noses and heading that way, for the prudence of the thing, with the same old joke about vitamin scotch.” He wiped his nose. “Party season. You’ll be there.” My personal presence for the holidays sounded accusatory, but he eased up. “Flowers in two months, or maybe three. I’d like to see them one more time.”

  My second nature tongue-tripped me on an invitation down in the same moment he spared me.

  “God sends the flowers to Charleston, don’t you know.” He stared out the window at what God gave New York; screw-faced he struggled through the gray, fitful scene outside as if for surer footing. “Lucille LePrince …” He lingered on those syllables, perhaps seeing her on the windowpane or just beyond it.

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Fifty, sixty years ago. Her goal in life was to have the first party every spring, but her luck was rotten. Every damn year she’d spruce her garden and send invitations and land right smack in the center of blackberry winter. Lived on Tradd Street, with the ivy-covered archway and the tunnel. Talbots live there now.”

  “I know the house.”

  “Of course you do. They buried their family there, just off the walkway toward the garden, the Pringles, I mean. Lucille’s mama was a Pringle; more money than a bank or the Cogswells who printed Confederate Currency down on the corner of East Bay and Broad. Lucille’s daddy was a LePrince, original family but on to hard times after The Conflagration, depending like they did on slave labor. But name is also currency down there, so it was considered a good match, and then Lucille’s daddy’s brother up and died without a place; leastways they claimed he had no place, likely so they could make a case for burying him right there on the LePrince walkway, to show how they felt about the two families being one or some such. I don’t know what those people were thinking, burying a dead man in the garden in modern times. Lucille’s mother liked to drive you batty with her simpering over the headstones, all chipped and worn down to nubs—damn kids used to play checkers on them—leading to the garden, which was the Promised Land, and we got to live there both before and after we died. My God, she’d go on over good cheer and good times and good company and good funerals, and that’s what Pringle always meant in Charleston, and she meant all ways, and so did LePrince too, because, just look. Damn Walter LePrince wasting away not three feet under on account of the water table and all. I don’t even know if he got embalmed or they just laid him under, not twenty feet from where they sat down to breakfast, chattering happy as mockingbirds, like it didn’t make a difference between where you lived and where you lay dead, because the house was the thing, marking family greatness for all time and with a good address t
oo, so those folks from out of town who might not know could look up and see how it was.”

  He’d got worked up and eased back for a breather until a new angle pushed him back up. “It was lovely, you see. For two hundred years lovely, with the flowers and headstones and the scotch and parties, didn’t make a damn if it came out blackberry winter. Trouble was, Lucille’s parents died one day in ’03 when the lot of them ate off a bad load of oysters picked too near the wharf. Typhoid. You ever see somebody with typhoid? Typhoid twists you up, won’t give a care about your address or a few hundred years or flowers or how much money rolls off a printing press. Typhoid knows you ate a ball of poison and need to die. That’s how civilized and quaint things were. Dropped damn dead.”

  He sat back and would have sat up again but raised a wobbly hand instead like a fighter asking for a moment’s reprieve so he could cough up from way deep the vicious hock generated by so much excitement. He did. I looked away as he lowered it into a makeshift cuspidor, which was an old tin cup appropriately dinged and dented.

  “So you … had a sexual liaison with Lucille LePrince?” I asked, not to touch a nerve but to help an old man regain his place in a story interrupted.

  “Hell, no!” But the sudden denial got him coughing again. His point by point enumeration of Lucille’s skinny body, nervous airs, shaky voice and altogether unattractiveness kept him coughing, till he stopped and found his pace. With another smile for a scorn refreshed and ready for another crusty derision, he whispered: “Daddy Ancrum.” He waited.

  “Daddy Ancrum?” I asked.

  “They stuck a silly name on me and called it Providential a long time later. King of the Tenderloin was a joke, don’t you know, till it explained my undoing years later, or so they’d have you believe. But they had Daddy Ancrum. That old Negro stood behind Lucille’s punch bowl all those years, pop-eyed and grinning, because he knew that’s what we wanted to see, and we did, though we’d never reflect long enough to realize why we wanted such a thing. Daddy Ancrum poured the punch and scooped the ice cream for the children of the right families. Oh, it was a hospitable crowd with a welcome for anyone new, except that none of them were ever dark-skinned, which begs the question of hospitality, if you ask me.

  “You think Daddy Ancrum had a wife or children or grandchildren who might maybe would have wanted to come to one of those parties? Hell no, you don’t know. Nobody did, didn’t even think about it or care. Wouldn’t have a made a difference. They were black!”

  He took a drink quick, deterring another spasm, or maybe bracing, as if someone might step in with a reference book showing further evidence on the essence of right thinking and the glory of defending it. When she didn’t enter on cue, he eased up. “Lucille LePrince was gangly as a stork, couldn’t get a boy’s attention to save her soul, and no wonder. She’d stand in front of that old black man, like to shriek till the birds flew off: ‘Don’t stop, Daddy. Don’t stop now, Daddy. I want to fill it up. I want it running over the top, Daddy!’”

  We laughed at his falsetto.

  “I liked Lucille; she was sadly awkward and bound for a single life. She never did come out, what with her parents dead and then there wasn’t much reason to anyway. They say there’s somebody for everybody, but then they said there wasn’t anybody for poor Lucille. Moved away when she got to be about twenty, few years after her parents died, and nobody knew why, what with the money and the house all to herself, but that’s another story. The real picture emerges when you take a minute to look at the so-called ladies of the society, who near took each other’s heads off, squabbling over who had rights to Daddy Ancrum with Lucille’s mama and daddy dead and gone and no longer in need of such services. They argued like women at a rummage sale, like he was a piece of equipment. It was a tribute to his strength of character that he didn’t care a hoot who he worked for, but the ladies made it a process to behold, because whomever he worked for had him till someone came and borrowed him, and then that someone was beholden to the lady who had him before. It was what they call a package deal nowadays, Daddy Ancrum and the ice cream machine, since nobody could remember who it belonged to, though I suspect it was Lucille’s, and her little show of generosity was to let it go with Daddy, so his employment opportunities wouldn’t be compromised. Daddy Ancrum hardly ever said a word, except to apologize for every little task he performed and say how he loved the children.”

  “I think I remember him. He worked for a time for Miss Annie, didn’t he?”

  The judge ignored me. “When he died, well, all those ladies were very sad. They had their own little memorial for him, nothing formal, just a shared grief over losing such an important cog in the social machinery. And I swear I didn’t give it a second thought till I heard the most profound eulogy delivered by Elizabeth Allston over punch to a few of her cronies. She said, ‘Old as Daddy was, he gave me a better day’s work than any of the younger ones could. It’s sad, them dying off like they do.’ Verbatim, after all these years. Those ladies had a little nostalgic humor among themselves after that, making reference to AD punch, which was After Daddy, which just wasn’t as good.” He stared for a minute.

  I stood. He watched, empty-eyed. “Well,” I said. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?” She slipped around the corner and leaned on the doorjamb in a pose you could call seductive if she wasn’t so old.

  “We could have given him more,” he said. “He could have given us …” He paused, uncertain what the old black man held out on.

  “The gift of native intellect,” I ventured, hat in hand, looking past her, down the hall to the coat closet.

  “Elizabeth Allston,” he told her. “Now there’s an institution. Do you realize how many Elizabeth Allstons they’ve had in the last few hundred years? And how little she’s actually done?”

  She ignored him in deference to my exit. “Tomorrow then?” she asked.

  I recoiled. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.” She pre-empted me with a flourish, striding to the coat closet for my coat. “Say, three o’clock?”

  “I don’t know.” He watched. She held my coat.

  “Anne is expected,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be lovely?” She smiled with effusions of loveliness, much as Elizabeth Allston might have done.

  The old man nodded and said, “Oh, sure, she could throw a party. What the hell good is that? None. I mean none that’s worth a damn …” I nodded, turned and left. He called after, out the door and down the larger hall: “Nothing. That’s what. As much nothing as any of it … them … nothing … You’ll see.”

  Lovely?

  I’m amused these days at the different forms it can take. For years lovely meant linens and silver, crystal and china. Now I sit on a bank still as sawgrass till the fiddlers think I’m another bump in the mud and ease on out their holes fanning the big claw to show whoever’s looking what the deal is and sidestep up the bank looking for social contact and tiny nibbles. They surround me in a few minutes with their clicking, dancing and posturing. The bull china-back has one small claw, and the big one runs two inches like all male fiddlers, and he waves it slowly over his eyes, cocky as a ringneck kingfisher calling from a half-rotted piling across the creek. Unlike the other fiddlers, the bull china-back’s shell is filigreed with purple pin striping in a perfectly lovely family crest. No mud sticks to this dandy; he saunters clean as the black fellow I saw on TV who washes cars in a tuxedo and doesn’t get a speck of foam on him. I waited fifty years to pick another one up for a closer look. Anne didn’t come by her father’s apartment that next day of my New York sojourn, not at three or four or five.

  I don’t know if he ever found peace in his heart, or if the path remained open without the flowers and warm scent he took for granted for so long. But I think he approached peace of mind, and death helped him on his way. I sit in the mud watching the little crabs, wondering what kind of lovely path I’m on now and maybe accepting for once that this may well be it.

  VI

  A Quaint an
d Sheltered Life

  The morning after the judge’s funeral and dinner at Jim Cohen’s, I stopped for coffee on King Street for two hours till the Library Society opened. I had the good sense to bring a pen and a legal pad, because a lawyer doodling on a pad is considered billable and best left undisturbed. The coffee eased the effects of Jim Cohen’s sweetwine, and since I had to write something, I wrote a list of questions on the general wonder of life, turning like it does to stare you in the face and damn near dares you to make sense of it. Two hours over coffee seemed like a stretch with so much foot traffic and all of it careful not to disturb a lofty pursuit, but that time passed too like another dream, fitful, fleet and solitary, decocting thirty questions in the end to one lone interrogatory, Your Honor: Why do the good suffer? I had a few more questions, like the number of seven-minute intervals required to fill eternity, but that was just foolishness.

  Moreover, I watched people, casual friends and close friends, pass in my periphery, careful to avoid disturbing the important work at hand. Maritime law, like much of our society, was one more ship in a bottle, antiquated and preserved, no longer mobile or exposed to the mutable influence of nature but rather protected for all to see its once-impressive splendor. That I would not be missed from the office was given. Maritime legal billings had gone further south than, say, commissions to the chandler’s boys, who used to race out in sailing skiffs to the incoming ships when the world moved by sail, which was only a hundred twenty years prior. Fact was, the last chandler in town remained in business for two reasons: all the others had gone under, and the real estate the last chandler sat on was paid for about two hundred years ago. So it was only old man Harris tending the till for walk-ins and his ancient mariner father showing a pulse if checked for one, tipping to the left or right infrequently, most likely to free the gas.