Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  Tal, of course, had been horrified to see his wife with two sets of earrings. “You look like a Ubangi tribesman!” he’d said.

  Tal had never seen me the way I really was. Maybe now I could see myself. I took the box of lingerie into the bathroom, set it down on the floor. One by one, I removed the panties; zebra-striped, red nylon, peach fishnet. I dropped a pair in the commode. It felt good. I dropped in five pairs in all, flushed once, and then again. The pipes made a gurgling sound, and water started to rise in the bowl.

  Back in my new house, I fixed myself a vodka and tonic and gave Jethro a big raw steak. Then I pulled a chair up to the window and watched while Tal and Caroline pulled up and parked her Triumph in my old parking space. When the phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop, I took it off the hook and fixed myself another drink.

  Chapter 8

  Merijoy Rucker knew something was up. Not for nothing was she the biggest snoop in Savannah. “A paper plant? And I bet I know who’s behind it. It’s that Mayhew person, isn’t it?” she said. “Coastal Paper Products? Diane Mayhew was at the Symphony Ball planning coffee this week, and she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I knew right away something was wrong. She’s been toadying up to me for months.”

  I looked around helplessly. The minister was shaking hands with people and making her way toward the door. Others were drifting that way too. If Merijoy Rucker kept me trapped here, giving me the third degree about Beaulieu, I’d never get back to the other parlor to check out the merchandise. Uncle James was no help. He was still deep in conversation with the Loudermilks.

  “Do you think anyone would mind if we looked around the house a little?” I asked Merijoy. “I’ve never been inside Beaulieu before. I’d like to get a last look, especially if they’re going to tear it down.”

  It was as if I’d issued a battle cry. Her nostrils quivered in indignation. “Nobody’s tearing anything down,” she assured me. “Let’s go peek in that other parlor. I think that wallpaper in there may be an old Scalamandré pattern. Prewar.”

  We both knew she was talking about the only war that counted in Savannah. The War of Northern Aggression. The Late Unpleasantness.

  As we turned right off the hallway, Merijoy stopped short—so short, I plowed right into the back of her.

  “Lewis!” she exclaimed, backing up quickly.

  The man she’d collided with seemed surprised to be recognized. He scowled in annoyance. His right hand moved quickly to the pocket of his blue blazer. But not so quickly I didn’t see him slip a small black camera into the pocket.

  “Well, hello, Merijoy,” he said, his frown dissolving. He nodded curtly in my direction. “Hello.”

  Lewis Hargreaves knows my name. All the antique dealers in Savannah know me, even the ones who pretend they don’t buy from pickers like me. Not that I’d ever sold much to Hargreaves.

  Hargreaves owns L. Hargreaves. It’s an “antique gallery”—nothing so plebeian as a shop. His specialty is big-ticket, one-of-a-kind early Southern antiques. Hargreaves himself is regarded as something of a boy wonder. We went to parochial school together, but whereas I was still a measly picker, Lewis had opened his own “gallery” his first year out of Georgetown University. It wasn’t long before his shop was being written up in all the big shelter magazines like HG and Architectural Digest.

  Merijoy Rucker leaned forward and gave Lewis a light kiss on the cheek. A soft pink suffused his pale face, and he blushed to the roots of his white-blond hair.

  “Lewis, you naughty thing,” she said teasingly. “What are you doing skulking around all by yourself in here?”

  Hargreaves blinked rapidly. “Just paying my respects to Miss Mullinax.”

  “Bull hockey, Lewis,” Merijoy said. It was the strongest language I’d ever heard her use. “You weren’t in the room during the memorial service.”

  “I was invited by Gerry Blankenship,” Hargreaves said. “It’s confidential, that’s all I can say right now.”

  Hargreaves walked rapidly down the hallway, toward the staircase.

  “He’s casing the place,” I said, watching his immaculately tailored back disappear. “There’s sure to be an estate sale, you know. I’ll bet he’s already putting in a bid for the good stuff.”

  Merijoy sighed. “I was hoping the furnishings would be left intact. It’s really vital to retain the original pieces for an important house museum like this.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. We turned in to the parlor. It was stuffed with piles of furniture, rugs, boxes, and crates.

  “Oh!” Merijoy cried, running the palm of her hand against the wall. The paper was a robin’s-egg blue, with murals of coastal birds: wild herons, marsh hens, egrets, and kingfishers. The paper hung from the wall in ribbons; large parts of it were obscured by spreading brown water stains.

  “My God,” Merijoy moaned. “This is a Menaboni mural. Hand-painted. And it’s ruined.” She pulled out her own pocket camera and snapped it.

  “Maybe there’s a way to mend it,” I offered.

  Over in the corner of the room, a stack of boxes obscured a large piece of furniture. It was a cabinet of some kind, loaded with bits and pieces of old blue-and-white china.

  I pulled the boxes away from the cabinet, sliding them against a moth-eaten braided rug on the floor. My hands were filthy from the dust and mildew on the boxes. Nothing in this room had been used in a very long time.

  Even in the dim light of the parlor, the corner cupboard stood out like a diamond in a handful of pebbles. I held my breath while I ran my palm over the satiny wood. It was burled elm, eight feet tall at least, with three scalloped shelves behind a pair of wavy glass doors. Below were carefully wrought doors and a scalloped apron. Bells went off in my head. This cupboard was the work of a master cabinetmaker, early nineteenth century. The craftsmanship would hold up to that of any of the famous Philadelphia or Boston artisans of the time, but the design looked Southern vernacular.

  “That’s nice,” Merijoy said, flicking at the cabinet door. “I’ll bet it’s original to the house. Look at the way it fits in that corner. You’re into antiques, Weezie. What kind of china is that?”

  “Canton ware,” I said, my eyes still on the cupboard. “From the 1700s. Very valuable.”

  Merijoy sighed. “The neglect. The ruin. I could weep. I really could. Look at that mantel.”

  I tore myself away from the cupboard and walked over to the mantel enclosing the fireplace. It was highly carved, with bas-relief nymphs and caryatids and all types of doodads.

  “Nice,” I murmured. I wasn’t really into Victoriana. I kept glancing over at the corner cupboard. It was calling me, seducing me.

  “It’s horrid!” Merijoy exclaimed. “So tacky! And it’s all wrong for this house.” She poked a pencil into the wood, which seemed to crumble like stale cake. “And it’s riddled with termites.” She snapped another photo.

  She stamped her foot on the floor. “I hate it when the owners fool around with an old house like this. There should have been a cypress mantel here. Or marble, maybe. Not this.” She flicked her hand over the carving. “Grotesquerie.”

  “Maybe the original is up in the attic someplace,” I said. “Or in one of the outbuildings. I saw a barn and what looks like a smokehouse outside. And that building right next to the house. A summer kitchen. All those sheds are probably packed with old stuff.” I looked around the room, at the dusty piles of books and papers, the boxes of linens and kitchen utensils, glassware and photo albums. “I don’t think the Mullinaxes ever threw anything away.”

  “Maybe,” Merijoy said, unconvinced. “Of course, the rest of the house could be a pile of sawdust too—just like this mantel.

  “Let’s go, Weezie,” she said, catching my sleeve in her hand. “It’s too depressing to look around anymore. Just from what I’ve already seen, it could take hundreds of thousands to restore Beaulieu. Millions, maybe.”

  I took one last, longing look around the room. At the cupboard. It was what had
drawn Lewis Hargreaves and his pocket camera into this room.

  Fortunately, the main parlor was nearly empty, because we were both a mess. My hands were dirt-streaked, my dress a network of wrinkles. Merijoy looked like someone had swiped her favorite toy. Her elegant black linen was smudged, her hair mussed. She’d bitten off all her lipstick.

  “That woman, Caroline DeSantos,” Merijoy said. “Is she really living in your house with Tal? Right under your nose?”

  Uncle James saved me from any more questions about our unusual living arrangement. He strolled up with Mr. and Mrs. Loudermilk trailing in his wake. He looked pleased with himself. Spencer Loudermilk looked happy too, for a petrified person.

  “Weezie,” James said, “I believe you already know Mr. Loudermilk.”

  I held out my hand to shake his withered little claw. “Your granddaughter BeBe is a good friend of mine, Mr. Loudermilk. She’s told me a lot about you and Mrs. Loudermilk. And Mr. and Mrs. Loudermilk, this is Merijoy Rucker. Merijoy is quite active in preservation.”

  Lorena Loudermilk squinted up at me from behind a cloudy pair of eyeglasses that had been patched in two places with duct tape. She was bent nearly double with the most pronounced dowager’s hump I’d ever seen, but her pale skin was smooth and pink, her teeth still even and white.

  “I know you,” Mrs. Loudermilk said, nodding at Merijoy. “You married that Rucker boy.” She hardly paused. “My husband, Spencer, has got a clamp lodged in his lower intestine. This lawyer boy here is gonna sue the pee-diddly out of Candler Hospital.”

  Spencer Loudermilk looked like a liver spot with legs. He beamed and patted his abdomen. “That’s right. You should see what I do to those metal detectors at the airport.”

  Merijoy’s one-track mind refused to be derailed for long. “Weezie and I were just catching up on old times.” She turned to James and gave him a dazzling smile. “Mr. Foley, you’re an attorney. Have you heard any scuttle-butt about what’s to happen with Beaulieu?”

  James has a very good poker face. My father says it’s because he was educated by the Jesuits. Daddy blames everything bad that’s ever happened with the Catholic Church or modern civilization on radical left-wing Jesuits.

  “Haven’t heard a thing,” James said blandly. “Excuse us, please, would you all? Weezie and I have an urgent appointment back in town.”

  He bowed and I said pretty good-byes, and as we walked out onto the front porch of Beaulieu, somebody grabbed my wrist. Caroline. Fine beads of perspiration dotted her upper lip. “What was Merijoy Rucker talking to you about?” she demanded.

  “Preservation,” I said. “She’s very interested in preserving old houses.”

  I tried to pull away from her, but Caroline’s nails dug deeper into the flesh of my wrist. The dark eyes were mere slits. “If she thinks she can turn Beaulieu into a museum house, she’s sadly mistaken. We’ve got a deal with the paper company. Airtight. And if she tries to raise some stink about it, we’ll raze this old rattrap to the ground. In a single morning.” She released my hand. “Tell her that, why don’t you? Tell her how single-minded I am.”

  I looked down at my wrist; there were red claw marks in the flesh.

  “You don’t know Merijoy Rucker, do you, Caroline? Well, I’m sure you’ll get acquainted very soon. The two of you actually have a lot in common. It’ll be interesting.”

  Chapter 9

  Weezie was shaking and milky-pale by the time she got to James’s car. Jethro stuck his head out the window and barked enthusiastically at the sight of her, but Weezie gave him only a halfhearted nod.

  It worried James, seeing Weezie’s moods shift like this. Moments earlier, she’d gleefully pounced at the opportunity to give Caroline a small measure of misery. Now she looked positively ill. Goddamn Talmadge Evans III.

  “There was certainly a lot of old stuff in that house,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Good loot—right?” To him the place looked like a hideous moldering pile of garbage, but then, as Weezie often reminded him, he didn’t know shit from shinola when it came to that kind of thing.

  “It’s fabulous,” Weezie said, picking at a bit of lace on the hem of the odd, drooping dress she was wearing. “Just in those three rooms I saw, there was enough for ten estate sales.”

  James started the car and busied himself with sliding a disk into the CD player. He turned around and asked, politely, for Jethro to please take his tongue out of James’s ear.

  The CD was the latest Clancy Brothers release. James sighed. It was a gift from one of his Florida parishioners.

  Mrs. Finley had bought him a box of CDs for his new car; the Clancy Brothers, the Irish Rovers, like that. James had been enthusiastic about the gift at first; but now he thought he’d go mad if he ever again heard a bagpipe or a Celtic harp. It was terribly clangy, Irish music. He wished he had some Trisha Yearwood or Garth Brooks. Simple stuff about pickup trucks and lying and cheating and drinking.

  Instead, he had the Yancy Brothers yammering away about some dreamy-eyed girl with a ribbon in her hair.

  “I hate it here,” Weezie said suddenly.

  They were bumping along down the oyster-shell driveway, past some tabby ruins covered with the foamy green of resurrection ferns.

  “Since when?” James said, shocked.

  “I do,” Weezie insisted. “Savannah sucks. It’s always hot. The gnats drive me insane. The marsh stinks like dead fish. The people are so self-satisfied, it makes me want to puke. People in this town like to think they’re so sophisticated. That Paris of the South stuff. What a load of crap! Nobody around here knows a damn thing about anything that really matters, like art or literature or music.”

  She ripped at the hem of the dress, and a strip of lace and a long patch of fabric came away in her hand. She threw the clump of fabric on the floor. “These assholes keep screwing it up. They tear down anything that’s good or beautiful.”

  “They pave paradise and put in a parking lot,” James said.

  “What?” Weezie looked at him oddly.

  “Joni Mitchell,” James said, pleased at being able to surprise her. He’d always loved radical folksingers, especially the ones with ratty blue jeans and greasy hair who seethed with the injustice of life. Maybe it was the Jesuit in him.

  He glanced over at Weezie. “Gerry Blankenship was half in the bag today. He reeked of gin. Drunk talk. Anyway, they won’t have to tear down Beaulieu, you know. It’ll fall down all by itself, any day now.”

  “Maybe.” Weezie kept seeing Caroline as she stood in front of the windows in the parlor at Beaulieu, looking out to the marsh and the river beyond. Like she owned the place. One more home to wreck.

  “I could make a lot of money off that estate sale,” Weezie told James. “Get the good stuff and get out while the getting’s good.”

  “Get out? What’s that supposed to mean?” James asked, pulling the Mercedes alongside Weezie’s rusted turquoise truck.

  “Fuck ’em all,” Weezie said. “Ticktock, James. What’s that Bible verse, about a time to every purpose? Maybe all the stuff that’s happening to me means it’s time to get out. Go to a real town. Atlanta. Maybe San Francisco. I’ve never been out west. Hell, New York. Why not? I could open my own shop. Be a real dealer. No more dabbling. I just need to make one good killing at that sale, and then it’ll be my time.”

  “Ecclesiastes,” James said. “Originally, of course. Although the Byrds did a nice version too.”

  Chapter 10

  The day after Anna Ruby Mullinax’s memorial service, I went through all my reference books on Southern furniture, looking for a piece similar to the cupboard I’d seen at Beaulieu. But most of the pieces I found were fancier, more high-style.

  I sketched the cupboard from memory, then took my drawing pad down to River Street, to the unstylish end, to the last unrestored old cotton warehouse in Savannah.

  Lester Dobie fished his glasses out of the breast pocket of his grease-stained cotton sport shirt and held my drawing
only inches from his nose. He squinted his eyes, moved the drawing back a little, sighed, and picked his cigar back off the counter where he’d left it burning.

  “Burled elm? You’re positive?”

  I wavered. Elm pieces were a rarity. The only ones I’d seen for myself were at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, and at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem. A huntboard and a blanket box.

  “Pretty sure,” I said. “The color looked like elm. And the grain. The piece was coated in grime, but that’s what it looked like to me.”

  “Double glass-front doors above, three shelves, fancy kind of cornice?”

  “I’m not an artist,” I apologized. “But I think the sketch is close. The glass was definitely old. Bull’s-eye, probably. It had the waves.”

  He rubbed the two-day growth of beard on his chin. Sighed. “And Lewis Hargreaves was looking it over pretty good?”

  “There was other stuff in the room. Really nice Canton ware. But I’m betting it was the cupboard he was interested in. He had a camera with him.”

  “Lewis knows his stuff. It must be the Moses Weed. Gotta be.”

  I looked down at the drawing, back up at Lester, waiting for his approval. Lester Dobie taught me everything I know about antiques. His junk shop, Dobie’s—just that, not Dobie’s Antiques or Dobie’s Ye Olde Shoppe—had been in that cotton warehouse as long as I could remember. It was where I’d bought my first antique, a pink silk and Venice lace Victorian baby pillow. I’d paid two dollars for it, out of my baby-sitting money, when I was fourteen. After that, I was hooked. A week didn’t go by that I wasn’t in his shop, roaming among the old wagon wheels and local-dug bottles that were his specialty.