Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  “Oh, John,” she said, as if it were Christmas morning, “show Christina the tent!”

  And so, close to midnight, we made our way through dark hedges and down the dip in the hill by the main house—John’s grandmother’s house—which stood watch over Nantucket Sound. As if she couldn’t help herself, she followed us through the wet grass to the lawn, where a huge white tent stood billowing. It was lit up and filled with people. And when we reached the entrance, she walked in ahead.

  There were actually two tents, she explained, one for cocktails and the receiving line, and a bigger one for dancing and the seated dinner. In the main tent, waiters from Glorious Food moved by us with the swift grace of dancers as they set up the large round tables and the white wooden folding chairs. Florists from New York were hanging lanterns and filling buckets and grapevine baskets with the simple summer flowers she loved.

  She introduced us to the man in charge and lavished compliments on the staff. John hung back, wandering at the edges; he’d seen it earlier. She stood at the center of the tent under the highest peak, a bower of blossoms suspended above her, and surveyed the world of her making. She stretched out her arms. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, her face glowing.

  And it was, to see the magic before the magic, the event before the event. I watched her then and thought, This is a woman who does not take life for granted. This is a woman who knows her luck and lives it, who grasps that beauty is transformative and transient. Even in a wedding tent.

  The next day, there was football in the morning and a laughing bride. Tears at the church and cheering from the crowd. There were champagne toasts and dancing. After the receiving line and before the dinner, the wedding party gathered near the dunes in the russet afternoon light, and pictures were taken: the bridesmaids in easy elegance, their hair wreathed and their silk dresses fluttering; the groomsmen with blue bachelor’s buttons in the lapels of their periwinkle jackets. All wore breezy smiles. And when a wind came off the water, Caroline’s veil got tangled behind her.

  The guests stood on the lawn and watched from a distance, the women holding on to their hats and smiling. The clink of glasses. High above, in front of Rose Kennedy’s wraparound porch, the flag that was lowered for tragedies whipped about, furiously dancing over the old lions of the Kennedy administration and Manhattan’s literary and media elite. Later in the main tent, John and his uncle Teddy gave their toasts, Carly Simon sang, and the mother of the bride danced in her pistachio dress, a gloved hand on her son’s shoulder. George Plimpton’s anticipated fireworks were applauded but impotent, done in by a bank of fog. As the night went on, the traditional standards shifted to the bluesy funk of an R & B band, replete with a horn section and Marc Cohn on vocals.

  I was seated at a table diagonally across the dance floor from the wedding party. It was lodged in a corner near an opening in the tent and came to be known that night as the “John’s friends’ table.” Kissy was there, along with Rob and his girlfriend Frannie, and Billy Noonan, a wag from Boston who told salty jokes most of the night, his eyes narrowed and needful of your response.

  To my right was Jeffrey Ledbetter. He was seeing John’s cousin Kerry but wasn’t seated with her either. I knew him but not well. He’d also gone to Brown, and there had been no missing him on campus. Heads above anyone else, he was always bounding somewhere, with his Irish setter at his side. Radiant and fearless, he wore his hair long, and I saw him as a kind of Daniel Boone, rallying others over the mountain. He was from Arkansas, from a politically active family, and he let you know about both right away. John had visited him in Little Rock, and there had been some famous camping fiasco in the Ozarks, each of them telling the tale with a different twist. “Our boy did well,” Jeffrey whispered after John gave his toast. He told me he was glad I was with John, glad I made his friend happy, and we talked of love that night.

  Months after the wedding, Jeffrey would die of an aneurysm. When John found out, he wept through the night, inconsolable. He had lost a close friend, one who was so young, but I knew that it was more. “We were simpatico, you know,” he said, as I held him, the boy whom death had touched many times, who made friends easily, and for whom life, in some ways, opened like a parting sea, but for whom intimacy and trust were rare. He’d had that with Jeffrey. When he returned from the memorial service, his grief had settled, and he spoke philosophically. Jeffrey had died in the middle of a snowball fight. There was poetry in that, right? And the autopsy had revealed a congenital heart defect that, if known, would have meant an entirely different life for him—a life that his twin/friend sensed would not have matched his spirit.

  The wedding was studded with beautiful women. On the other side of the tent, before the toasts, as John busied himself with best man duties, I saw him laughing with an attractive bridesmaid he’d once had a dalliance with. He’d told me about it, and although he’d brushed it aside and said it was nothing to be jealous of, I was. I remember because it was the first time I had felt that with him—not the seething sort, but an opening, a soft sinking recognition of how deeply I’d fallen, how much I adored him, and how well I could be hurt.

  John sent his cousins by the table to check up on me and make sure I was amused. Willie Smith was courtly, with sad eyes, and he delivered messages in a muffled voice. Timmy Shriver took it upon himself to relay all the weaknesses of his younger cousin’s character and each and every childhood failing. John was skinny, he wasn’t a good athlete, he dressed like a sissy. “Why are you with this guy?” he prodded. I noted the code of the beloved cousins: The more you love, the more you tease. The band had begun “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and like a white knight, Anthony Radziwill interrupted Timmy’s spiel and asked me to dance.

  Anthony, son of Jackie’s sister, Lee, had grown up in England and looked proper in his groomsman’s jacket. Through his father, Stanislas Radziwill, he was a Polish prince, although the title was now a courtesy and he never used it. Of all the cousins, he ribbed John with the greatest élan and the most pleasure. He was less aggressive than some of the other cousins, but his words had a certain spur. In the middle of the Gershwin tune, John appeared on the dance floor and tapped Anthony on the shoulder, asking to cut in. Anthony ignored him and, grinning, spun me repeatedly out of reach as the song continued. Not for a year / But ever and a day. John followed, darting around us. “Cutting in, Anthony … I said, cutting!”

  I laughed as they tussled. Finally, he elbowed Anthony out. “Sorry, Prince, find your own girl. I’m stealing her away.”

  His hand was warm on my back. “Where’ve you been all this time?” he whispered in my hair, and told me I looked pretty. Then he made me repeat everything the cousins had said about him. “Jerks!” he bellowed, but I thought he seemed quite pleased.

  I loved dancing with him to the old songs. He did well with the box step, and I coached him on the fox-trot and Lindy. Like any private school boy, he knew the steps and could dip and spin with the best of them, but he didn’t like to lead. It wasn’t his forte. He was better doing his own thing, solo but connected, and so was I.

  When it grew dark, after dinner and the cake and the fireworks, he found me again. The second band had come on. His pink tie was loosened, the jacket was off, and his shirtsleeves rolled. He pulled me onto the dance floor, and soon I kicked my sandals into the wet grass.

  On the night before the wedding, after we returned from the late-night tour of the tent, Mrs. Onassis showed me to the room where I would stay. It was small, near the top of the stairs, with sewing supplies and an ironing board ready for morning. As she held the door open, she said she hoped I wouldn’t mind, the guest rooms were full. My bags were already there, placed neatly inside the door by Marta. In the back of the room, suspended from the eaves, was Caroline’s wedding dress, low-waisted with a shamrock appliqué and a twenty-foot train stretched out in sweeping dips.

  “Oh,” I gasped. The dress was stunning.

  Mrs. Onassis smiled, watching. “Well … good ni
ght.” She stood there a moment before she closed the door, her voice a caress that lingered.

  Maybe, I thought as I undressed, the bridal custom extended to all the women in the house, that we all must sleep alone the night before a wedding. Maybe, like Aphrodite, purity could be renewed by ritual. As much as I wanted to sneak across the floorboards to my man in the sarong across the way, I didn’t dare. Not that night. She had shown me to the room.

  I sat on the edge of the single bed. The dress hung in front of the small window, backlit by a streetlamp on Irving. When I was little, I hadn’t always played at being a bride—it was more harems and intrigue, more ballerinas and Indian princesses, torch singers and Mata Hari. But that night was different. Under a thin coverlet, I tried to sleep, but the dress, consuming and fragile, moved in and out of my dreams, like a beautiful ghost.

  In the years that I was with him, and the many nights I was a guest in his mother’s homes, this was the only time I was shown to a separate bedroom. I asked him once if his mother was all right with us sleeping together under her roof. I knew there were rules to be followed with her, and I didn’t want to misstep, but he assured me that this was not one of them. His girlfriends had always stayed over. “She’s cool with it,” he said with a measure of pride. “Since high school.” I thought of my parents and the byzantine double standards of those years that never seemed to include my brothers. Even at the age of twenty-six, having a boyfriend sleep over was an iffy prospect. “No, she’s not like that. Not at all.” His mother had a theory, he went on, that his grandmother Rose’s attitude toward sex had created problems for his father, and she didn’t want that for him. I didn’t ask about the problems. I nodded.

  The day after the wedding, before I left to begin the trip back to Connecticut and the long push of rehearsals before opening, John took me to meet his grandmother. She would be ninety-six that Tuesday. Two years before, she’d suffered a major stroke and couldn’t attend the wedding ceremony, but after morning Mass in her living room, the house was alive with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who’d gathered to say hello.

  Two of the Lawford girls stepped aside, and it was our turn.

  “Happy Birthday, Grandma. It’s me, John.” She didn’t speak and kept nodding her head.

  “It’s John, Grandma.”

  The nurse told him to speak louder.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I knelt down by her wheelchair. She was so frail, so small, it surprised me. And I remember pink all around her. A dress, a blanket maybe. Her hair was done just so, and she wore lipstick. The desire to look pretty had not left her. I took one of her soft blue-veined hands, and she smiled. Her grasp was strong. John held her other hand. He spoke about me, how we had met and the play I was doing, and that he would start law school in the fall. With a gleam in her clouded eyes, she motioned as if she wanted to tell him something. He leaned in. “Why, yes, Grandma,” he said with a wary smile. “You’re right—that’s true.”

  As we walked back across the lawn, I asked him what she had said.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “I just pretend I understand her. She likes that.”

  “Really …”

  He thought for a moment. “She said it’s time I settle down and you seem like a lovely girl.” He squeezed my hand hard and kept walking. “I’m glad you came. I’m glad you were here for all this.”

  I would see him in a week, after the play opened, but I began missing him right then.

  We reached the corner of Scudder and Irving, and as he loaded my bags into the waiting Town Car, I asked if he wouldn’t mind taking my dress and dropping it at the designer’s showroom when he returned to New York in a few days. I wouldn’t be back in the city for weeks. “No problem,” he said. I learned never to do that again. He would leave it on a wire hanger, out of the hanging bag, in the back of his Honda with the window down at LaGuardia short-term parking. The dress wasn’t stolen, but a rainstorm bled the dye of the fragile silk. No dry cleaner would touch it. My boyfriend, I learned that weekend, was the man of the hour in a striped sarong, a toastmaster par excellence, and a dancer who made my knees weak. He was not, however, one to trust with prosaic errands involving couture.

  He’d been lukewarm about the dress to begin with, I could tell. He was always complimentary about what I wore, always noticing small details, but this dress, he said, was “fine.” Maybe it was the bone and black pattern or the sheer organza ruffle at the neck, but I suspected it wasn’t sexy enough for him. It was a dress other women liked. At the reception, even his aunt Lee, a frequent fixture on the best-dressed lists, had asked who the designer was. Ever politic, he did say, “Mummy loved your dress. She thought you looked very pretty.” Any praise from his mother I took in tenfold; I wanted to please him, but I wanted to be accepted by her.

  As the plane lifted off the runway in Hyannis, I pulled out my script to run lines. I glanced down for a moment, then turned it on its spine. The last two days had been exciting. I was glad I had come, glad I had danced into the small hours, glad I had seen his sister get married. Mostly, I was happy to have been a part of something that meant so much to him.

  In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, / They’re only made of clay. The lyric from the night before wouldn’t leave my head, and I turned to look out over the arm of the Cape, the territory that was his. I tried to make out the white tent or the flagpole or the many-gabled house, but there was only a puzzle of shoreline. Just then, the plane banked, and the sun bounced off the silver wing and blinded me.

  I lowered the shade. I felt lucky. And my dress, I decided, had been right. It had been just right.

  Holding

  Come quickly—as soon as

  these blossoms open,

  they fall.

  This world exists

  as a sheen of dew on flowers.

  —IZUMI SHIKIBU

  When you fly over the coast of Georgia, press your face to the glass. The land below is flat, emerald green, and cut with water. Creeks and rivers meander in tight switchbacks, snaking their way through mudflats to the sea. Above the trees, smokestacks of paper mills rise like watchful gods. Before you land, you’re already in a different world. There is something in the air, something ancient that makes you move more slowly. You turn a corner, you catch your breath, and the pale color of the sky reflects back the sheer measure of your soul.

  In the dead of summer, three weeks after Caroline’s wedding, we flew to Jacksonville, Florida, and after a side trip to Disney World and a VIP tour of rockets at Cape Canaveral, we caught the last boat of the day, the R.W. Ferguson from Fernandina Beach, and set off for a nearby barrier island. It would be our first real vacation together.

  “You want to take a trip, madam?”

  His asking had been both shy and nonchalant. We were sitting by a cornfield in Connecticut, and he was fiddling with the laces of his red Converse high-tops. The field was near the Sharon Playhouse, where I was doing Isn’t It Romantic. The day before, he’d looked at me quizzically and said he’d never been with someone whose career was so important. My eyes opened wide. Was that bad? “No,” he said. “It’s attractive. I think that’s what makes us work, that we’re equals.”

  He had driven up the Taconic the night before to surprise me, announcing himself in lipstick on my dressing room mirror. I’d dashed off the stage, changed quickly, and found him in the July night, smoking a cigarette near the parked cars with one of the crew.

  We’d had long weekends alone or with friends at the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard, my parents’ country house on Long Island, and his mother’s in New Jersey. And there had been a rafting trip with his cousins that June in Maine, where we’d spied a moose up close. This would be different. Ten days in close quarters, testing mystery, the mainstay of romance—with no possibility of retreat for a night or an hour.

  “Someplace neither of us has been. Someplace we can discover together.”

  It touched me
that he thought of it like that, as a way for us to grow closer. A place that would be ours. It felt grown-up.

  I knew at once where we should go.

  “How about Alaska? Or Taos!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to go there, and you’d look sweet on a horse.”

  “Too hot,” I countered. And I told him about a place I’d known about for years—Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

  I’d first heard of Cumberland in college, when friends camped there over spring break and brought back tales of an island as large as Manhattan, with ruined mansions and feral horses roaming on white sand beaches. I was hooked, then promptly forgot about it. In 1983, I read an article in The New York Times travel section, a paean to the island by Lucinda Franks. I clipped it, and for three years, it had followed me, dog-eared, from sublet to sublet. Without having set foot on Cumberland, I was already in its thrall.

  There are places one falls for as deeply and as devotedly as for a lover. For reasons you can’t quantify, the alchemy of air, light, and smell call to the most primal part of you and conspire to make you theirs. I’ve been moved by Santa Fe, Paris, and Seville. I’ve reveled in Rome, Telluride, and Guadalajara. I’ve been awed by the deserts of Morocco, the spires of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, and the painted depths of the Grand Canyon. But it wasn’t love I felt.

  Sometimes it’s the place where you grew up that says, You belong to me. No matter how long I’ve been away, when I come back to New York City in a taxi over the Triborough Bridge and the afternoon sun shifts off the steel skyline and blinds me, I feel it. In the heavy July of privet tinged with sea salt on the East End of Long Island, where I spent nearly every summer until I was twenty and many since, I know it. And in an empty theater, with the ghost light on and the darkness, warm and velvet like a dinner jacket my father once wore, it’s mine.

  But it can also be without history—sudden, violent, a coup de foudre. I’ve felt the sharp jolt of recognition in my throat, the pull in my chest, standing at the humble stone huts in Dingle, walking up the winding path to the Cave of the Apocalypse in Patmos, and, most profoundly, in Big Sur, where I’m reminded that I’m not all human, not just heart and flesh but soil, sea, and sky. Big Sur is a place that lives in me, a place that does not let me go. Another is an island off the coast of Georgia.