In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  This too may have been sophistry; she was such an easy price to pay. More importantly, I didn’t see any reaction in her to my comment on the absence of racial hostility, so I doubted she’d been told about the old Arthur Covingdale, the button-down, suit-and-tie, brick-throwing, cross-burning sonofabitch. Not that it mattered; those events, people, places and behaviors that feel too personal for public view are also natural, whether bad or good, and only by viewing and airing out can things change, easy as that. I wondered if all of France was so cavalier, or was it only Guadeloupe, or just her. I determined then to tell her of my misdeeds one day, so I could be the source of her knowing and spare us the rude surprise.

  At any rate, we headed to Folly Beach on a Thursday evening, and since it was thirty miles each way that could easily lead to nothing, we planned to stop for dinner at Bowen’s Island, close to and on the way to Folly. Jim Cohen got wind of our plan and said he spec dat be’s igna’t as igna’t be’s, paying good money for oysters you could have for the picking.

  Aníse hushed him with her happiness, telling him she tried dancing on the oyster beds, and it didn’t work, and besides, it was the picking she wanted free of, and besides, she needed to get out and about to see if she wanted to stay around, you know.

  I gave her points for subtlety and couldn’t blame her for wanting to get out, but a man feels the screws tighten, no matter how exotic the woman or the situation. I wrestled with the advisability of Bowen’s Island, the pros and cons grappling to a draw all the way there. We pulled in to the parking lot as I clearly saw that where we ate in public, like so much else, didn’t matter. In a hundred years we’d all be dead anyway. Still, I repressed the next forty minutes for fear of the living required to get through them—and the stories arising from them that might be told for another century or two.

  Bowen’s oyster-shell parking lot would have cost upwards of ten thousand dollars anywhere else, but the Bowens got it free and took care of the trash-hauling in laying it down to boot; this interesting iota I pointed out to my date, who stared at the oblique plain, reflecting concerns equal to my own. So our adventure into the world proceeded, intrepidly, against our collective instinct.

  Bowen’s Island is an island only technically, bounded to the north, west and south by the Intracoastal Waterway and to the east by the Folly River. But Bowen’s was clearly an island in the cultural sense, home to the Bowen clan for eons, those people deriving sustenance from the creeks and marshes with only a modicum of social etiquette, like the Wadmalaw Cohens but different; the Bowens were white folks. Their island remove was unpolluted, their oysters sweet as ever, served roasted, sit-down, for money. So it wasn’t a restaurant with dishes and menus and such. It had tables covered with fresh newspaper from one party to the next. And oyster knives. But the chief characteristic was its refuge from a world picked clean as a piglet in piranhas; this certain part we’d held back for ourselves. Bowen’s Island had no signs. You had to know where it was or know someone willing to give directions. The real reason for no signage at Bowen’s was the nightly sellout. The Bowens declined signage, not “us.” We didn’t want “outsiders” stopping in for oysters, shrimp and crab like nothing ever happened.

  You couldn’t get oysters that good anywhere else without the boots, the mud, beer and whiskey, the rain, gloves and knives, ebb tide, bushel baskets, the truck, the fire, sheet metal, burlap, picnic table, rags and cocktail sauce. A demanding schedule made Bowen’s the only option, if you wanted to scratch that itch. Oh, it was our essence and inner sanctum, insulated by the hail-fellow falderal popular with the seersucker, penny-loafer crowd. So why did I pick Bowen’s? What else could I do, take her into town? Like I said, I didn’t think it mattered.

  Yet town seemed better as we neared Bowen’s. At Bessinger’s Barbecue the cracker crowd wouldn’t know me. That was twelve miles farther but made more sense on second thought and third as we shuffled across the lot. “Maybe barbecue’d be …”

  “No.”

  As we walked on I nearly felt my membership card to Jimmy’s Social Club, nestled in my wallet like an anthropological artifact, claiming my right to socialize with friends in a private club. Jimmy allowed no blacks. When did I change? Would I ever taste chicken so good again? Arthur Covingdale hitting Bowen’s with his new date. Man. Whatchou thankin’?

  She looked over, so I explained there was no menu. It was oysters, crabs and shrimp with corn bread, coleslaw and a sidefly, your choice of okra, collards, field peas, succotash, lima beans, green beans, summer squash, rice or potatoes. They serve the oysters with a shovel. She didn’t see the mirth in Bowen’s serving folks of certain crust and genealogy from a shovel. Or in that same gentry bringing a brown-bag bottle for a most efficient dinner and drunk. “Maybe we might ought to go get us a bottle.”

  “No.” She hooked her arm under mine so the charm could work its magic once more, for a few more paces anyway.

  You can walk into the Valley of the Shadow whistling Zippity Do Da, but that won’t lighten your prospects. Sho nuff, Aníse and I walked in like a modern couple to see my longtime friend Hedley Rice having dinner with Ashmead Montague, whom I’d met on several occasions and worked with twice. I didn’t know Ashmead Montague too well but he seemed warmly predictable, meaning he wore his trousers low and entered a room with a happy face plastered in place. He had the high forehead and swayback common to the area and appeared to be programmed since infancy on what to wear, how to walk, what to say and how to say it. I sensed that Ashmead Montague had lived in full comprehension of the proverbial low profile since early adolescence with extreme emphasis on no surprises. He had no choice in this constrained naturalization, given the blue blood coursing damn near purple through his veins. Ashmead Montague practiced the law as I had done, as did his two bubbas, Ashmead Pringle and Pringle Montague, unrelated by blood, legally, unless you count the roots ineluctably intertwined to the point of tangling inextricably under the family trees; all the Ashmeads and Pringles germinated from the same conjugation back in the 17th, with the Montagues tying in just around the turn to the 18th. To suggest inbreeding was plain rude, and reference to a diminished gene pool would have flown over the collective head like a goose at midnight. What? Did you say something?

  Ashmead Pringle also practiced the law, like Ashmead Montague, but Ashmead Pringle sold real estate too, while Pringle Montague just practiced the law. So the three had no choice in daily life either but to call each other bubba as they redirected wrong calls from folks looking for one of the other two. That sort of complexity was well served in town.

  But the devil was in the details; calling someone bubba and actually bestowing bubba status were birds of entirely different feathers. The tough part of the equation for Ashmead Montague, who now waited with something perfectly pithy on his tongue as the distance closed between us, was that his bubba and cousin long removed, Pringle Montague (that was Prangle thereabouts), had kept his man Marcellus in twenty-four-hour attendance for the past eighteen years, meaning Marcellus waited hand and foot and then some, but social injustice was never an issue because everybody knew that reciprocity is a fundamental tenet of homosexual society. Service with love, and in this application, service in love, as it were, predicated the two-way street, with traffic both ways, going and coming. In a nutshell, Pringle and Marcellus were a novelty, an amusement, a source of humor and, in time, a local familiarity, reflecting what could well be called the tolerance for eccentricity in town. It made no difference socially that Marcellus was black, because they were homos. Isn’t it odd what passes transcendent in the spirit of social parity? Pringle Montague was one of us, by birth. And that was all there was to it, just like a particular judge had been a cousin and bubba hardly removed before he defiled our historical values, foremost of which was our ageless decency, don’t you know.

  I supposed that the jury was still out on my new honey and me. I knew with certainty, however, that I’d reached the point where personal history overruled the bigger pi
cture, in that the sight of these two rendered me fatigued with the whole ritual now before us; hey, bubba, how you gittin’ along? Whatchou fittin’ a do? Jeatchet? Whassissear? Ashmead Montague was, in a word, tedious. He was boring too, if you needed another word, and a royal pain in the ass, if a phrase was required. Rethinking his capacity for pithy retort to the peculiarity now among us, I anticipated something along the lines of, Well, now, lookaheah; Mist Awthuh finally got him some comp’ny, huh?

  Among his modes of dispelling any notion of his own appetite gravitating toward the peculiar, in case anyone might confuse him with Pringle Montague, the homosexual, was his tireless and tiresome reference to the smutty side of womanhood. I’d seen him just prior to my retreat from town, so maybe he was among the last straws bearing down on my back. I’d entered a conference room down at the office, where he’d just confabbed over settlement terms with two of our young attorneys on a divorce. Our fellows represented the husband, Rutledge Reid, candidate for the Congress of the United States of America, an office he’d sought for the duration of his adult life, which many reckoned had yet to begin, but his impending success could bode well for our office, which is why he got two attorneys instead of just one, because these boys were our up-and-coming hot shots and billed out good too.

  Ashmead Montague represented the wife, Mary Ellen, who was rumored then to have loosened her morals dramatically in a last ditch effort to make Rut jealous and win him back, which is another story entirely and hardly warranting further accounting here. Said loosening, however, was rumored to include but not be limited to a series of blow jobs administered to Bubba Loomis in the back seat of his car, a black Mercedes sedan (used) to be sure.

  The point here, if you’ll pardon the circumlocution once again, was Ashmead’s failure at redemption. That is, in the aforementioned office which I entered at the tail end, so to speak, of the negotiated terms, there was Ashmead Montague confiding to his bubbas, attorneys for the defense, recalling, like the man of the hour he so wanted to be, Mary Ellen’s last visit to his office.

  She had worn no underpants, which she’d also been rumored to do, but then she was also rumored to yen for orgiastic intercourse with couples or women or out-of-towners, because that’s the toxic result typical of small town gossip, in which we fared no different than small towns anywhere. Mary Ellen crossed her legs, he said, not modestly like a woman but ankle over knee like a man, so when she rocked back in contemplation of the terms they would seek, “why, she aimed that thing at me like a Gatlin’ gun, and I’m here to tell you it was the most terrific beaver a man ever laid eyes on. I mean to tell you that thing was big!”

  The other attorneys present were boys, not yet clear on the vicissitudes of gentlemanly conduct and all ears for a good pussy story. Oh, Ashmead had their attention. But their professional affiliation was my own, so I stayed to observe as they grinned on cue, taking issue only on Ashmead’s choice of simile. Hastings Bayden said, “Ashmead, you don’t mean a Gatling gun, do you, Bubba? You mean, like a elephant rifle, don’t you?”

  To which Ashmead Montague rejoined with the unique conviction of a learned barrister, “No, I mean a Gatlin’ gun. It was big enough for a elephant rifle, but the breach was warped, indicating repeated exposure to overheating as a result of rapid fire, Your Honor.”

  I walked out on the raucous guffaws. I’ll concede my own appreciation of an off-color story, but this went beyond lawyer-client violation to defamation, to abusive tedium, rendering me sick of the entire charade as a result of repeated exposure to grown men of perceived stature sustaining each other in mutual edification, going deep into brogue to seal the bond on de mos tuhriffic buyhva (the most terrific beaver) and Ah muyhn a tellyu at thang was big! (I mean to tell you that thing was big.)

  Again deferring to the requisites of social adaptation, Ashmead wasn’t judged harshly; he only clarified his position on the sexuality issue; no homo there, not like that other Montague. And I saw him again soon after, when his good cheer, cordiality and manners were impeccable, adherent to the rules of our road.

  Hedley Rice was far less predictable and in fact was a source of intellectual stimulation. He avoided the local brogue as much as he could and honestly pondered his life, challenging himself on purpose and meaning where he could. A physician trained in orthopedic surgery, he gave over early in his career to emergency room medicine for the set schedule of the thing. For years he swore he’d made the right choice with the ER’s fixed schedule, freeing up his time to fish and be with his children without suffering totalus interruptus every day, which is a doctor’s cross to bear. I believe he’d pick the ER again, though it embittered him over the years, wasting his education and skills, according to him, on humanity’s very lowest dregs imaginable. That is, his complaint day in, day out, focused on that segment of the population gone out of control, haywire, without resources, without hope but burning the daylights out of whatever potential God ever put into a living creature. That is, ninety percent of the patients in his emergency room were Negroes suffering what only euthanasia could cure.

  He’d complained about an entire shift given over to a black woman, age fifty, whom he could not approach because of the stench, fecal and regurgitated. She’d come to the ER because she “don’t feel no good,” with nine children in tow and assurance that she could pay for part of this visit next Tuesday when de ADD check posed to come in de mail. That was then, when ADD meant Aid to Dependent Children instead of what it came to in the age of sensitivity, Attention Deficit Disorder. Then she puked, hardly trying to lean over, puking down her front, onto the dried puke already there, dribbling over onto the examining table and the floor. Diagnosis: pregnant. Hedley’s diagnosis: repugnant; don’t ask; man, oh, man you would not believe … and so on and so forth into a bottle, soaking down what ailed him. The single cure Hedley demanded over and over, over the years, short of euthanasia, because he knew that was a long shot sure to meet resistance in the media, was sterilization. But hell, no; you can’t go depriving a citizen of God-given rights like that, because human life is sanctimonious, much more than say, dredging and filling twenty acres of marsh for condominiums so the money could flow where it had to, and there goes what ought to be sacred but ain’t. Hedley swore he was no racist, because he hated the bastards who built the condominiums and the bastards who moved in, every damn one of whom was white, proving his equal opportunity disgust with folks in the area, and I suppose I liked him for that.

  I could go on. Suffice to say the stage was set for drama of a delicate and personal nature when I walked into Bowen’s with my new date.

  To say the tension was thick enough to cut with a knife would be putting it mildly. But then I’d taken some effort to sort my life into what I loved and what I’d rather live without, more or less forgetting the tolerance of the place after all. That is, even as I was choking on social self-defense and casual aplomb at the same time, nearly straining at the braces for a humorous line that might ought to ease everybody into modern times and what appeared obvious to me, which was the worldly sophistication of the woman on my arm, I was mindful of Ashmead’s homosexual cousin and Hedley’s wife, who left him, by the way, claiming she couldn’t live with such a hopeless drunk anymore, moving directly north seven miles to the Isle of Palms beach house of Dr. Lattimer Smythe, a longtime associate and friend of the Hedley Rices, who seemed only too eager to help a woman in need, and just as eager to plug the gap in her love life.

  Moreover, nobody begrudged any gain of Latty Smythe’s, who for decades lived with the Smythe burden of proof—proving they were up to upper crust. Everybody knew they weren’t; they were Smiths for heaven’s sake, changed over to Smythe for the Elizabethan ring of the old English, and the extra letters made the difference between soda bread and baguettes. The change in spelling occurred late 18th, which was sorely recent relative to social sway.

  The overriding point here was that Hedley was practically celibate those same decades Latty was socially second class;
but the last two years were worse, with celibacy staying on at Hedley’s place, even though the wife moved out. Hedley wasn’t the first man to consider sex exponentially more frequently than engaging in it, but this was Hedley Rice of the Georgetown Rices, a physician of eminent stature, family history and income, who couldn’t for the life of him tame a little leg. His deprivation was not a matter of public information, but I was made privy to his need at regular intervals, reviewing his roster of candidates for the sexual act. But he was stuck, afraid to miss, afraid of the sexual harassment indictment, afraid of the gossip line and the womanizer epithet. Trouble was, he couldn’t score dribbling. No matter how deftly you handle the ball, it’s still a case of never up, never in. Hedley had his image and reputation to protect, or something, so he couldn’t come out and ask for some you-know-what. And no woman would come on to him, because he frankly scared hell out of them with his propriety and turpitude. I urged him to go on down to Beasley Barrineau’s Blow Job Parlour out on West Ashley (no signage there too) for the magical interlude known to cure what ailed a man, but he couldn’t, because you never know who might see you at a place like that.

  But you’ll see them plain as they see you, I explained.

  But no, he insisted; it didn’t work that way.

  Oh, his eyes opened steamy as two oysters on the shovel load in front of him when he sized up Aníse. Hell, all we needed to do was shake hands like acquaintances do, how you doing, and pass in the night. I repressed what would come next, the APB on Arthur Covingdale gone native in the worst way going worser still, taking that black woman of his out to dinner (!), which news would arc every dining table in town within the hour, making it common knowledge on the street a good three days quicker than a direct feed to the local paper.