Well, she seemed game for a try. So I put the tough questions aside and rode it out, as it were, one hour to the next, or, simply put, from gathering to preparing to eating and sleeping with the natural beauty still abounding, as if nothing had changed in a month or a century of fleshy pleasures taken as necessary there in the region called Lowcountry. With historical perspective and a sense of tradition—and a profound deferral to nature and the blessed moment—the terrible doubts so common to this veil of tears were held at bay. It wasn’t so bad. Hell, it was good.
By the eleventh month of our communion, the third month of gestation, repercussions veritably echoed from the paved village to the north, primarily in Eudora’s gleefully vindictive voice, “She’s preggers! His black bitch is preggers to beat all get out!”
What is it with former wives who get everything they demand yet retain the bitter bile? Well, of course they don’t get everything, because you can’t get the best years back, and any woman will pounce on a scapegoat so available, because a woman who can identify the cause of imperfection in her life is eminently facilitated to better endure lunch with friends. She has a place to go, conversationally.
Eudora didn’t get the house either, because it was in my family five generations, and she moved there from a dump on the back end of Society Street, and her case for restitution was presented to a judge residing two doors down from me.
Given, however, that Eudora’s cerebral capacity was similar to that of a smallish legume, the question still niggled: Why would a mixed-race infant of unwed parents generate such foul anticipation among small-minded people? What could this child do but learn potty training, dressing itself, going to school, playing outdoors, growing up and finding a niche in which to make a contribution to society, break no major laws and live happily, as warranted by our Constitution and reiterated by several amendments, proclamations, caveats and annotations?
More to the heart of the matter, I daresay I’d match my black bitch to her Jeffers Rutledge on the auction block any day, figuratively speaking of course. Not a bad fellow if taken substantively, Jefferson Rutledge was among the handful of lawyers whose word, intention and standard was every bit as straightforward as he was. Of course he could afford to be, having secured contractual agreement with the State of South Carolina on legal review of all revenue bonds issued from 1934 on at a fee set by common practice then of ½ percent, which comes to some big dough on two billion dollars in bonds annually, or for the last eight years anyway. So what did a man of that stature and wealth need with Eudora? I suppose the same thing I needed with Aníse, but only after a fashion.
Jeffers Rutledge was eighty, owning up to seventy-eight, insisting on the two-year difference, like Jack Benny but pathetic instead of funny, as he literally disappeared under the folds of flesh, laughing and coughing to alarming levels. A man so wealthy, wise and wizened worked out well for Eudora too; he provided such compelling context to a vamp of sixty-two, who could no longer keep her lipstick inside the lines but swerved a quarter-inch over on top, maybe to look red hot for some pecker juice extraction, which Jeffers likely anticipated but she would not do, and he really didn’t mind, tired as he was. He only needed to ask me to know these things before he married her, but then he wouldn’t likely have married anyone without the prenupts. Even then he may have offered more money than I ever hoped to have. Whatever the practicality or arrangement or romantic rigmarole drove Eudora and Jeffers to matrimony is conjectural, though I know doubts were rampant, along with sordid speculation on the consummation of the marriage vows. Jeffers Rutledge required more maintenance than a sports car, and that kept him good for slow speed straight-aways. Eudora deserved a husband like that. Knowing her as I did, I savored her internal accounting, balancing dollars against disgust, emptying the catheter bag. Of course I was harsh, and that task would be hired out. Maybe I only proved our mutual resentment.
Now the speculation on consummation aimed south, at Aníse and me. At least we generated no doubts. Aníse was known by then as physically viable, and I wasn’t even sixty, giving us a leg up on the image of Eudora and Jeffers in sexual congress. I reckoned Eudora on top by necessity. Who could hold Jeffers up? Not him or her. Besides, she preferred the top spot for the inferred superiority of the thing, and the view would have been easier, with his jowls and wattles laying flat instead of hanging in festoons like those of an old hound. I suppose the moles and liver spots would come at her either way, but bottom still seemed best for him. By the same token her breasts would actually look like breasts if allowed to dangle. On the bottom, they’d slide sideways, like batter on a tilted griddle. Yes, that talk is unkind and ugly, making it suitably responsive to the thoughts, intentions and dialogue in the air, aimed our way.
Aníse, on the other hand, was a beautiful woman by any reckoning, given a certain social flexibility, which we had plenty of, out in the heart of the marshland. She required a fair degree of stamina too, but few men would dodge that challenge, and I chuckled at the envy simmering in Jefferson Rutledge’s tough old heart. Few women would decline that effect on men, of motivating them to peak performance. Eudora was the exception, though she clearly saw the beauty and the power; his black bitch is preggers proved that far more potently than it conveyed her hateful amusement.
Still I wondered why the ex-wife harped so shrilly on my apparent dilemma. She’d wanted children years ago but adapted, socially speaking, to the freedom and mobility of childlessness. We never traveled like she professed she’d love to do, because anywhere else she was a fish out of water. Nothing rounded a woman’s resume like London and Paris, but she was afraid to go, afraid she might be seen as provincial, parochial, close-minded and afraid, or maybe they’d laugh at the way she talked, so there she was, still safely home, on the brink of old age, showing Beaufort’n Grainvull on her life’s itinerary. Oh, and Hilton Head Island, though that place too was rapidly failing to Yankee imperialism.
We’d settled what remained between us. Yet here too I was blind to the forest for the tree of a darker hue. Maybe Eudora’s bitterness derived from another phase of waste I’d put her through, or something equally vague. In the end she was a shallow, greedy woman who spent her days the only way she could have done, sustaining a cheerfulness that, now and then, she may have felt. I didn’t expect her to be happy for me, but she needn’t have shown such scornful glee either.
The year was 1969, when the world watched three white men on TV as they touched down on the lunar surface, then prayed, raised a flag, claimed another colony for the mother country, played golf, prayed some more and cruised in a dune buggy. Their lunar frolic was blended with many important experiments for the betterment of mankind. Womankind still deferred to the master gender then and appeared only in commercials between the scenes of touchdown, astronauts at play, prayer or experimentation. None of the astronauts or women in the kitchen or bathroom praising detergents, dish soaps, disposable diapers and douches, digestive aids, degreasers and cross-your-heart bras was black, or colored, or Afro American. African American came later, way after black was no longer de rigueur. I don’t point this out as a measure of social disparity but to underscore the depth and dimension of my situation. I felt farther from home than the Pop’n Fresh fellows on the moon on TV. I felt farther out than the proverbial far out, banished to the seventh moon of Uranus. Can you imagine the street-level murmuring generated by my casual passing again along the byways of my adult life? But the greater question to me was whether this apparent fulfillment of my days here on earth was indeed desirable or a punishment to be endured. Was my lot to feign happiness in a cheerful charade, like Eudora?
Of course confinement was what I made of it; the atmosphere I chose was not a vacuum but a vibrant bit of nature with some society thrown in, a different society to be sure, though the integral component of that society was female and loving.
Life is fraught with difficulty, and I felt grateful for practical distraction. Rumors of AC and his new darky family out at the
Hunt Club were neither surprising nor challenging; this talk was anticipated and in fact its absence would have been a greater cause for anxiety. The challenge came in logistics, in practical consideration of long-term habitation, which is not to say convenience to church, schools and shopping. I was done with that, clearly and comfortably so. But a man sees what needs his attention.
Peter Maxwell, who had issued the original invitation to stay at the Hunt Club, solved our fundamental problems in large part naturally, once again. He drove out unannounced, not that he could have called. We had no phone—could have had since ’67 of that century but opted out. I wanted no calls, because a cut should be clean and decisive, I thought, perhaps knowing the painfully predictable nature of the calls incoming. I suspected Peter’s motivation in coming out to see us but couldn’t fault his curiosity. After all, with Ashmead Montague braying like the Philistine’s last ass over the red hot mama ol’ Covindale’s bangin’ like a drum out at the Hunt Club, what man wouldn’t want a look-see?
But Peter was cordial and sincere as always, greeting me and then Aníse, as if it was my old house in town, and she was my new little woman, and the sun was shining on our blessed world, and everything was simply lovely, and we were all white. I paint this scene in mockery, even as I ask what more anyone could want than this scene, except maybe for the part about all of us being white, which I, for one, am content with and moreover have no desire to be otherwise, though I understand that most blacks today take umbrage at the notion of their Caucasian aspirations. And I suppose, if that scene of urban idylls were real, and we were all accepted, white and black alike, I’d get itchy feet again for a taste of the wild side. But then you never know what might happen, if you’re getting it regular with great fervor and conviction at home.
At any rate, Peter Maxwell spoke freely, again like a true friend. “I don’t know why you got yourself into this, Arthur,” he began, checking himself, smiling at Aníse with an unavoidable once-over. “Well, I do know—I mean, I understand you were restless and needed a change and one thing and another. It doesn’t matter. I want you to know I respect whatever decisions you make.” He let his approval of my life sink in, but not too long before proceeding to the practical reason for his visit, lest I view him as superior, which view remained an exposed nerve in our crowd, because we were. “Fact is, a man needs a place to live.”
He paused again here as if to allow hope, so Aníse and I could share a brief, anxious glance. Then he proceeded with: “You can’t stay here.”
He paused yet again for another eyeful, this time of the ramshackle but venerable Hunt Club, home of the tallest tales of white men yet risen from the Wadmalaw mud. Again my eyes settled downward at a complete loss for logic, down to the vast blank space beyond the question: What comes next? I could do nothing but stare at something, in this case the ground, and wait for things to play out, reminding myself of the new little woman’s great-grandfather, perhaps feeling equally shiftless with nothing to say for myself or my unwieldy behavior.
“Unless you buy it,” Peter said. I looked up, suddenly grounded, back home among associates in the realm of real estate, buy and sell, terms and conditions, parties of the first and second part, aforementioned and by all parties witnesseth. “I mentioned it to the other fellows.” He seemed uncomfortable at this point, as if our friendship had fundamentally shifted no less than a rift in the earth’s crust after a tremor. “Nobody’s coming out as long as you’re here, and none of them want to ask you to leave. I proposed we sell you the place, and then if we want to come on back out some time we’ll get us a new place maybe on the creek. You know, with a dock and all.” He paused so overlying concepts could line up for proper absorption. In this case those concepts began with the tolerance and understanding of old friends, then went to generosity, because established white men do not give each other charity, and from there, on to the future and deeper needs of the Hunt Club, which may well go to the Hunt & Fish Club, given the natural proclivity, affluence and sporting skill of the brethren hunters and fishers.
I looked directly at him for the icing on the cake, and he said, “Thirty thousand. We figured you’d have the cash, but if not, we’ll carry you for eight years.”
“Why eight?”
“We all gettin’ on, Arthur.”
To tell the truth, Peter and I had both taken a look at what might be available on the creek. Those places didn’t come up too often, mostly because they didn’t sell back then; they were so far out of town with nobody to talk to and nothing to do. They’d just sit there with a For Sale sign on them, growing mossy mold on the north side, and the south and other two sides too. Besides advertising the most abundant crop thereabout, which was mildew, For Sale signs looked so commercial, which was tantamount to tasteless, or, in some quarters, tacky. The old Chace place was up for sale, though, for thirty thousand. I knew it, and I knew Peter knew it and would have bet he reckoned he knew I knew it too, unless of course he and the hunt boys were banking on the collective assessment introduced to that group by Billy Whitehead, which was that old Arthur Covingdale’s got his mind stuck on pussy, and once a man … blah, blah, blah. The concept here was me, happily deranged and thereby an easy mark for engagement in anal intercourse of a commercial nature, which I suppose is what charity cumma generosity gets around to, once the other fellows reckon the mark is getting all the gash, so nobody comes out a loser.
Moreover, there was a time when the old Chace place with its deep-water dock over a known spottail and sheepshead hole would have put my heart in my teeth. I’d pondered the difference between two times, which weren’t exactly the best of times and the worst of times but were in fact the former time and the right-now-this-minute time. I’d taken a look at the old Chace place about a week or two prior and finally gave in to necessity, determining to buy the place; that is, the old Chace place. Fact was in hindsight, however, with two bedrooms, a big porch, living room, dining room, kitchen and two wet bars, it was straightforward, all grown up, landed and gentrified in the soulful, country, Caucasian spirit of things, and the thought of furniture and that whole dog and pony couldn’t but lead to the next thought, which was entertaining and house guests, and damn it I’d just absolved myself of sinful living, so why in hell would I sin again so soon?
The Hunt Club domicile, on the other hand, was perfectly marginal, thick in the brush and suitable to a misogynous old fool who had no notion whatever of what tomorrow might bring, much less next year, and felt fairly happy with not knowing.
“It’s a acre,” he said, which was a rare and desirable parcel size, since most places were far bigger, meaning more liability, more insurance, more maintenance and more tax.
“You mean the Hunt Club or the Chace place?”
Peter blushed red as a sugar beet, more or less proving that he’d figured on my ignorance of the Chace place, busy as I must have been humping my black bitch. He recomposed admirably though. “No. Chace place is two acres.”
“Two and a third. I’ll give you fifteen. It ain’t worth but twelve.”
“Fifteen?”
“I got the cash.”
“Well …” So the deal was done, and we both knew that.
Credit to Aníse; she neither wide-eyed nor glanced my way, proving her worldly knowledge of what it meant to be an old, white lawyer, which was, in a word, a man with the cash to solve the problem.
Peter Maxwell looked away, shook his head and looked back with a smile of resignation, as if old friends like us had to take care of each other, or what was the whole damn point of a thing in the first place? He spared us the burden of saying aloud how many dollars the brethren would need to cough up for the Chace place with only fifteen on hand, but I could see him thinking. Nor did he concede the lowest price pre-approved by the brethren. Instead he offered his hand, which, in that blessed region was contractual as an inch-thick document, though to appease the devil surrounding us, infiltrating the very leaves on the trees as they cast their magical green tint
on the slanting sunbeams, we would move next to an inch-thick document.
I looked down at his hand and nodded once, as if we could remain friends in spite of what life had put between us. I took his hand in my own and shook it, though I doubted the gesture held the same obligation or promise it once had.
Aníse cut the tension, inviting Peter to come in for some tea. He laughed short, maybe checking himself on asking if we had some o’ dat fresh tea the country darkies love, meaning life everlasting or sassafras. He begged off, a hell of a schedule and all that; his girl would work up the papers, so we could sign off in a day or two, or the following week if I needed more time to, you know, get the money together or think things over or any damn thing. I assured him I was ready any time the documents were done. As we shook again, I sensed a constraint, as if he felt something on his hand, jumping there from my own. Well, he could wash it soon enough.
So we settled in to nesting, me and mine. Aníse wasn’t a bad cook but lacked culinary aptitude. I, on the other hand, had always enjoyed cooking as a form of repose. Maybe she was compelled to be the cook in deference to traditional roles, though the traditions ruling her life to date were as far removed from Elm Street as I was from Broad Street. I told her to read a book; I’d cook.
I called the J.C. Penney’s and the Montgomery Ward, because both had delivery and got us a new bed and an easy chair with ottoman and a few lamps and an end table and a small stove with an oven. We stayed busy and grew closer for it, as nesting couples will do, till her skin color was incidental and then invisible. She was no longer a foreign language that I translated into English on my way to comprehension and response. I processed her front and center, literally and figuratively, till I dreamt of her, both physically and essentially, heard her and spoke back with no intervening process of translation.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 23