In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  Miss Edmunds lived in Bedon’s Alley, a major pinnacle on the social range. Not an alley in the conventional sense, with no stray cats or garbage cans and certainly no bums, Bedon’s Alley is an enclave of houses buffered from pedestrian byways. No street leads to Bedon’s Alley. To call it landlocked would sell it short; it’s protected. It must be born into. Its wooden houses lean from age and unstable crust. Its masonry houses droop their roofs like children daydreaming on their feet, with gardens like knee breaches pressed and laced in childish dishabille. Twisted spearheads on iron fence tops and glass shards topping garden walls deter any burglars left over from the Eighteenth Century. Miss Edmunds’ house still needs paint, and a tricycle and skateboard clutter the yard now. The stained glass in the corner alcoves show matching bucks on hills, but the windows sag from age with beer-belly bottoms. The drapes are still open so the curious and envious can look inside. The windows, shutters, dormer and furniture lean askew as if drunk or tired or both. Breathing walls meet rolling floors. Pictures hang aslant. Cracks scurry, the dinette slumps and chandelier hangs aslant, or so it seems. A gilt plaque out front announces: Miss Edmunds’ House. And a would-be original woman narrates each room’s notable anecdotes; who slept where and who his cousin was, all leading to someone who signed the Declaration or perhaps watched it being signed or was alive then and likely fished nearby both before and after lunch taken from a brown bag on the Battery, where, of course, The Great War began. But this was years later, when nothing remained but the shell of the former self, and tourists came gawping on the Tour of Homes, a common format but nowhere served with such certitude, fortitude and magnitude.

  Meanwhile, back in circa ’08, Miss Edmunds served tea and sugar cookies. Annie described the event to a woman whose life was an international adventure. They walked through the garden, though it was February and barren.

  She squeezed my arm, Sarah, I feared a fit. She said, ‘It will madden you in March! The riotous azaleas are near too much to Sear. The wisteria, child, is more than I can stand, alone. But you know that.’ She has guests for weekends, or weeks, March and April. She touched my heart, so far past her prime and her foolishness. She set her table for two and kept it that way. So I accepted, for genevieve and myself.

  Annie and the dog crossed the great divide in April for a few days to visit among flowers and tea in blue oyster demitasse, and to share in Miss Edmunds’ radical, perhaps revolutionary experiment—monogrammed doilies! Unseen and unheard of in Charleston till then, these doilies were momentous and proof of trust in her new confidant. They were printed out of town for security. Miss Edmunds served tea and asked,

  What do you think? Are they Dutch? To which I merely replied honestly, but I suppose it was the perfect thing to say: ‘You do set the standard here.’

  Bingo. Next thing you know Miss Edmunds is suggesting that two can live far more efficiently than one and have more friendship than living alone. Would Annie like to sell her house and come live in Bedon’s Alley? Annie declined, proposing regular luncheon instead. She wasn’t ready to take up with an old woman but couldn’t help love the old woman for that most sympathetic characteristic, her vulnerability. Miss Edmunds couldn’t hide her loneliness and put it on the table like an honest woman. Their first luncheon was planned for a select guest list. They said nothing of the doilies, nor did the guests, but by May the local printer was swamped with orders. It was a smashing success, on a level in modern times with a major detonation downtown followed by naked abandon.

  So ended the Miss Edmunds interlude. Annie said Bedon’s Alley was too confining and described herself physically, perhaps for the vicarious pleasure of her pen pal. Taller than most women, she called her figure complete, its contour and firmness a complement to its complexion and hue. Miss Edmunds was recalled forty years later in a series of letters with the greetings torn away, letters to Sarah, long dead. Beside herself by then with scandal, divorce and dissolution of her life as it were, Annie was easily forgiven her raw behavior. The old poodle joined the haunt thronging her last days. She wrote:

  The past seemed infinite, once upon a time. Now I can measure it by the number of friends left to recall it. So little remains. Miss Edmunds had a story to tell for each chip in her Blue Oyster Service, each episodic, so tea time was good for stories. I heard them a hundred times. The teapot handle was broken in unloading from the boat in 1764. God bless it. The day before she died I chipped her creamer lip. ‘Don’t worry. You make such a lovely story. Now you’re part of my service.’

  Oh, dear, dear, dear. I wish she could join me for tea now. What old fools we get to be.

  On Fridays Miss Edmunds fetched the bourbon if things were getting on, casting fate to the wind or sultry heat, naughty girls. Drunk again on memory, Annie addressed Miss Edmunds:

  I could spend days on end with Genevieve with nothing much to do, but your house was always there with tea and good time, so I never had to wonder at all …

  And in the same letter, back to Sarah:

  You would have liked Miss Edmunds. She had such a lovely way …

  Maybe she was past realizing these letters would never be posted or received, or past caring. She drew on the only company remaining, which was that of memory. Apparently out of chronological order near the center of the bundle was Sarah’s response to Annie’s most provocative letter, in which Annie teased with romantic innuendo, hinting love for another, a man, the first man mentioned in all the letters from her first childish thank-you, age twelve until 1911, age thirty-two. She wrote that he’d called, a young fellow she believed to be known in town as the King of the Tenderloin. She then mentioned other young men expressing interest but easily dismissed them as

  … part of all that crowd. They’re so silly.

  Waties Waring was different:

  He’s quite handsome, not in the conventional sense but more striking, angular in his facial structure, handsome in dramatic terms. I’m not so sure about him. He has trouble remembering which line comes next, and he seems an awful typecast.

  A most available bachelor with youth, a decent appearance and steady income, he boldly strode through Charleston’s young womanhood. She thought him unsatisfied because those women were cast from the same mold as the silly fellows, as if she alone could provide what he lacked, namely substance in a woman.

  Those women are always in vogue. They make themselves up. I’m not sure what he could see in me.

  Annie made herself up, but the rouge made her cheeks bright red, so she drew grease pencil tears and a big black frown.

  I’m pretty but plain, and I’m content with that.

  He happened by as she came out of her house with Genevieve, an obvious coincidence. Exchanging hellos, he sputtered; she couldn’t quite get what but it sounded like an invitation to spend the weekend at his father’s creek-house.

  His bordello in the woods, he should have called it.

  He gave her a rose and rambled over a fire in the box and plenty of quilts and fresh shrimp from the creek. When she remained speechless, he said it might rain, might not. Eventually she laughed, in his face, as it were. She told the same story forty years later in another letter:

  He was outlandish from the start, but it could have Seen his greatest charm.

  She remembered him as awkward, tedious and boring otherwise. Sour grapes notwithstanding, her last opinion was no different than her first impression. She told him there on the street when she finally found her voice that he was

  a rake and a scoundrel.

  She left in a huff. It must have stimulated the young stud. Sarah’s reply was the first in several years:

  Come, let us reason it out. You love me, do you not? And you would gladly spend two or three months alone with me in the country? I too should be glad of this solitude a deux and not only glad of it; my health requires it. I cannot leave Paris for such a length of time without putting my affairs in order, and affairs of a woman like me are always in great confusion; well, I have found a way to re
concile everything, my money affairs and my love for you, don’t laugh; I am silly enough to love you! And here you are taking lordly airs and talking big words …

  The sentiment is yet another Marguerite Gauthier soliloquy, suggesting that Miss Sarah rarely existed between her lines. She pulled out near the bottom though for a brief personal note:

  L’experience serait a tenter, petit choue.

  Experience is good to try. This phrase too is idiomatic to the French but is clearly encouraging. She advocated the outing.

  I am coming to Charleston. Adieux.

  Chance meetings on the street compounded Annie’s panic. Waties would tip his hat, half bow and mumble Miss Annie.

  No thank you, I told him again.

  His pressure was synchronous with Sarah’s impending visit, announced by her first letter in a long while. That letter spawned a frenzy from Annie, most of it pleading for help. She said a big difference between Waties Waring and Marguerite Gauthier’s French lover was in the two dialects. The Charleston brogue is curious. Annie Gammell called it

  a great security blanket most people here carry into adulthood and then to the grave. They walk down the street with it. They suck their thumbs with it as though I can’t see what they’re doing. It’s not a difficult thing to escape. I have none of it. Most others here hide under it, though I do wish I wasn’t so harsh. I know some who can’t come out from under it. But even if he were one of those, still you see the difference.

  The dialect is hard to write. It has a few notable words but is mostly a nasal patois derived from the Gullah of the islands. House becomes hoose, three is shree, boat is bawt, the center of a word stretched over a diphthong to make it melodious like boawt, thick as molasses with a dash o’ de mash mud ona tawp.

  There was no solitude a deux suggested. It was more like Hoo boot some a dat foress frolic, Sweetie Pah! He wants to sleep with me in the bushes! He’s so indelicate. Come quickly, please.

  In another chance encounter he blocked her way to further plea for assistance in relieving his hormonal crisis while droning over culture, the stage, the arts in general, because Charleston was always one of your, whatchacallit, major foundations of culture. And art. The contention persists. This was a new tack, perhaps a last resort, appealing to a more sophisticated and perhaps more lenient nature. He boosted civic pride and his rapture over Miss Bernhardt’s performance on the weekend of the seventeenth, for which he knew she was engaged, because, after all, dat’s show bidness, so

  ‘Hoo boot de twenty-fote?’

  That’s when Mary McGrew walked by.

  Mary McGrew was a vamp, the type later known as a slut and later yet as comfortable with her womanhood. In kinder terms she was a girl about town. Recently returned from a divorce in Boston, she was tolerated in Charleston, undefined and unmentioned. She’d been seeing Waties Waring, and it showed.

  She is pretty. She makes herself up. They were so calm when she walked by. They said hello. I blushed. I could practically hear the branches cracking and her shrieking for Mercy. And more …

  Mary McGrew was

  a bitch in heat. God shouldn’t extract the ordinary penalty from the poor child but rather let her die in the midst of her beauty … and luxury. (more Dumas)

  He longed for her. I could see it in his eyes even as his mouth chewed on culture. I walked away. He looked so confused, like a lost boy. If he followed Mary McGrew, it would have looked bad. He could have followed me but lacked the stamina. I wish you could have seen him standing there telling himself finally that it might not rain after all, then crossing to safe passage up Queen Street. He does seem vain and self-serving.

  Nature had revealed its fundamental drive, and Annie was clearly enamored to be part of it. Sarah came mid-May and played two shows in one day, the ineluctable La Dame aux Camelias for matinee and Proces de Jeanne D’Arc in the evening. A review from the local paper is flecked with dark brown over the decaying medium brown, like it was spat on. The review lamented Madam Bernhardt’s age and waning greatness, then spewed the compulsory parochialism over art and who we are. Penciled in the margin in degrees of fading emotion was:

  Lies

  lies

  lies

  Though the emotional response came decades after the review, the words grasp a failing woman’s desperation. The playbills reflect Annie’s unique fragility—and the tenuous, artistic soul we’ve claimed since The Great Loss. Inside the back cover of the evening program, Annie drifted like a milkweed seed on a spring breeze. Doodling in the margin here too, she wrote:

  Ambition Love

  Romance Sarah

  Sarah Bernhardt

  King of the Tenderloin

  Loin Tender

  God should be merciful …

  VII

  Our Crosses to Bear

  A standing joke in town was that time could be measured in fifths, and that didn’t mean musical interludes. As I recall, this self-deprecating but face-saving humor emerged around ’64 or ’65 of the recent century, about the time Johnny Carson pointed out that distance in LA was no longer measured in miles but in minutes. Soon after Johnny told his joke, someone in town retold it for those of us already deep asleep by the Tonight Show. Someone said it’s just like time around here, measured in fifths, and don’t you know it became our little joke. How late did such and such a party go? Oh, about three fifths. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

  Everybody laughed in deference to our peculiarities, pratfalls and addictions, because you had to laugh—or die sooner or later without. It wasn’t funny but hit the bull’s-eye that was us from such a precisely skewed angle that we overlooked our epidemic alcoholism for a better view of our humanity. After all, Johnny was talking about us in a way, making our little Paradise a worldly place, hardly different from LA. At any rate, nobody complained, so the joke got told over and over, legitimizing us as fun-loving people. Another standing joke was the nickname the town went by, the Holy City, because of all the churches, though the devil couldn’t be happier with available vices in a mannerly setting anywhere. We were not evil, but the converse—that we were holy—held as little water. We had our crosses to bear like everyone else, yet our particular burden, the booze, was unique in its magnitude and consequence, as was our dependence on it to nurture our little garden of eternal nicety. Community alcoholism surrounded by temperate weather, polite society, beautiful flowers, hospitality and history thicker’n a skeeter swarm is not your average fare up the interstate.

  They say excessive drinking doesn’t hurt you nearly as bad as it hurts those around you. I suppose I should remove myself from judging that one, and if I had my druthers, I’druther recuse Miss Eudora from that bench too. I won’t say I didn’t make her suffer the ill will and hurtful behavior a drinker pours freely from a liquor bottle. I will say that a woman never warranted more abuse from an alcoholic. Even if there are no good drunks, that doesn’t make all drunks bad. Some pass out prior to hostilities, while others abuse everything around them. I was an abusive drunk, letting the hurtful truth rise from subliminal consciousness and sputter all over anyone nearby. Eudora would have been miserable in any event, because she was not a happy person. And a more boring woman never lived. Sober, we worked through it, as they say. Just add alcohol, and I’d enumerate her blind spots, tracing them to genetic shortfall that rendered her so goddamn pigheaded and dumb.

  Her mother Betty named her “Eudora, in the rich tradition of Southern Gothic literature.” That was Betty’s set piece for her daughter’s potential greatness, whether literary or social or cast in masonry, say in a statue of the mother and daughter displaying monumental poise and grace. I wanted to see both of them cast in stone all right. Yes, that talk was ugly, but it fairly captured the sentiment of those decades. Not to go too far out on a limb here; suffice to say that neither mother nor daughter owned a single volume by Eudora Welty or ever checked one out of the library or the Library Society or spent five minutes reading a single story there or could quote a single phrase
or cull an idea or concept from any paragraph ever written by Eudora Welty. Betty got the gothic part right. She was a natural there.

  Betty and Eudora Summer often claimed historic antecedents for whom Summerville was named, but they never spent five minutes there either; it was so gauche, Betty said; and tacky too, Eudora chimed in, her finger on the pulse of modern times. Much less did either one let another five minutes pass without running her mouth like an oscillating fan, in case any quarter needed filling with words of sheer, numbing stupidity or mean-spirited gossip or plain idle talk of no avail to any man or beast. You spend twenty-seven years with a woman; you know the ins and outs. The mother’s dead. The daughter took up with the first man who paid her any mind, God grant him the liver to withstand her.

  I don’t mean to pick the parts of my road-kill marriage up off the pavement and jam them into place to make sense of the greater picture. I only point out that my name is Arthur, and I am an alcoholic. That I have good reason to drink excessively is of no matter, nor does consequence derive from the years that woman drove me into such a funk. The salient point is that I never went regular down to the AA, because it’s a misnomer, because you can’t scratch your hind side left-handed in town with anonymity much less get up in front of a roomful of drunks and admit you’re one of them, as if they didn’t know, whether you showed up or not. I’m on a regimen now based on nutritional supplements, which people here laugh at and say I’m too lazy to attend the meetings and only fooling myself. I know I spared my gut about forty gallons of coffee with sugar and a few pounds of cigarettes by not going down there. I do go sometimes when it gets tough, to take my mind off things, even if only to displace my troubles with the drone of other people’s troubles. I believe those people are well intentioned. More importantly, killing a little time is sometimes all you need.

  Maybe the relevance of these iotas was that I was one thousand one hundred and fifty-two days without a drink the day Waties Waring went six feet under. Jim Cohen poured my first drinks in all that time that same afternoon, and I didn’t think twice about down the hatch, because a funeral warps your perspective no less than a lifetime of gravity slumps glass.