by Farris, John
"The subplot involving a secret mission for the Union Army? That never happened, did it?"
"No, I made it up. Emily was just a shy little mouse all of her life. 'Home is a holy thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals . . . here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden.' I guess that's how I feel about the Barony, and I really empathize with her. I got run over by a maniac; Emily was psychically paralyzed, you might say. But when I was writing Honor's Flame I imagined that just possibly there could have been a supreme moment in her life, during the period of the Civil War when she was strongest and most passionate and writing all that good poetry, when she con quered her fears and had a real honest-to-goodness adventure. But the great romance of her life could not be consummated, so she withdrew forever."
Abby looked at Joe to see if he was bored with the way she was rattling on; his smile encouraged her. "So, do you read Dickinson?"
"Let's say I've been exposed to her."
"Hate poetry?"
"No, I read a lot of poetry when I was in isolation in Bujumbura. I had a tattered copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Hopkins, Yeats, Tennyson. They kept my mind off the pain and probably kept me from going crazy too."
"Africa," Abby enthused. "I have dreamed about Africa, ever since I discovered Blixen. How I would like to be able to write like that! 'Out on the safaris, I had seen a herd of buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.' Is that fantastic? I like to read something that brilliant before I get to work, it raises the ante. Gives me something to shoot for."
"Your work is very good."
"Tell that to my critics."
"Where did you study writing?"
"Study it? I just did it. Schools are okay for fish, but they're bad for writers. Excuse me, but most of them give master's degrees for jerking off. Okay, here's the old campground for the Thomasons and the Abelards, among others."
"I am not going in there" Lizzie said firmly. "Do you know what she does, Joe? She comes down here to dictate. After dark."
"After dark is when it's most fun;" Abby said, with a mischievous grin.
"Yuck. Even Stephen King's not that weird. C'mon, Bruiser, let's go down to the beach. See ya."
Joe followed Abby into the graveyard.
"Probably not much of this would be here if Hugo had come ashore a little farther north. That was, what, in eighty-nine? We were still living in Beaufort then, and it was plenty rough down there. My great-greatgreat-grandfather's buried over there in that little marble house. He's almost as famous in these parts as the Swamp Fox. But I really need to have this place cleaned up. Oh, and you might enjoy seeing this. Can you give me a push, Joe? I can call you Joe?"
"If I can call you Abby."
"Nobody ever, ever refers to me as Pamela, except Charlene. I can't get her to stop. I do think she thinks she's being respectful, and not just acting like a bitch. See those little markers? Westminster Abbey has its Poets' Corner. This is my Critics' Corner. Whenever I read something I don't like and the perpetrator signs it, I get out my woodworking tools and burn in a headstone and bring it down here. Over there's the New York Times Book Review. Zap! Lie down and 'eat dirt, book reviewers! Oh, and here, God rest, is the snide little shit who said in Vanity Fair he'd rather spend an hour in the bathroom throwing up than read a chapter of one of my books. I'd rather he would, too." Abby smiled through Joe's laughter. "Vanity Fair! Hell, I was crushed. I subscribe to that magazine."
"Do you read all of your reviews?"
"Yes, and any writer who says he doesn't is a liar, in my opinion. But when a bad one comes along, I just get back up and dog away. The English reviewers have been good to me. They praise me for the authenticity of my research, but how would they know? It's true, though. I feel like if I make a mistake, get a date wrong, my whole life is invalidated. Compulsive-neurotic, that's me."
The moment arrived, then, when she couldn't think of any more to say, and they simply looked at each other. Abby nibbled her lower lip.
"Just passing through, huh?"
"Well, I was in Atlanta visiting a colleague at the Centers for Disease Control. Laddy said I should take a week at Hilton Head to try to relax, get in some golf. So I got there, and—just stayed in the condo for three days. I couldn't move. I didn't want to eat. Sort of a panic attack, I think. Because I didn't know who the hell I was anymore, or what I wanted to do. I guess it's like coming back from a war. The sleeping's bad, the nerves are shot..."
"You hide it well."
"I'm trying to be on my best behavior," Joe said, with just the right note of rueful charm.
"You don't have friends in South Carolina? Don't know anybody here?"
"Nobody. Well, I should say—now I know you."
She nodded.
"But in a way," he said mildly, "I feel like I've always known you."
She nodded again, as if, listening to gospel, she'd had a vision.
"Sometimes people meet, and—"
"Yeah. Right from the beginning. Is that called empathy?"
"Empathy is when there's nothing left in your glass and you go, 'Hey, bartender, one more thtinger.' Don't say it! I can't help myself sometimes. Maybe 'serendipity' is closer. I'll look it up in my Funk and Wagnalls."
She turned her wheelchair in a slow circle, returning with a smile for Joe.
"Joseph Bryce," Abby mused. "I just can't get over that. I am so glad you went to the trouble to look me up. You probably didn't know I'm supposed to be an isolato.""
"Like Emily, baking gingerbread and eavesdropping on their visitors' conversation from behind the parlor door?"
"Good Lord, I'm not that bad. I get to town once in a while, hit the bars. But it's such a— Look, I live in a totally different world. For one thing, everybody except for little kids is two or three feet taller than I am. I get a neck ache at parties, looking up. At those people who have the courtesy to acknowledge I exist. The handicapped are not treated as badly as lepers used to be, in polite society. But," she concluded, with a hard, perhaps resentful look, "almost as badly."
"Is that why you don't give interviews or do book signings? You don't want your fans to know you're a paraplegic?"
"As Robert Murphy said, my paraplegia represents a contamination of identity. I want my readers to think I've had all the lovers I write about, that I'm an adventuress—let them use their imaginations where I'm concerned. Envy Pamela Abelard for who they think she is. And keep coming back for more, keep those cash registers hinging away." She laughed, a little edgily. "I hope I haven't been doing an interview without knowing it."
"It's a private conversation, Abby."
"Where're you staying in Nimrod's Chapel?"
"The Planter's House."
"Food's good there," Abby said, summing up her opinion of the Planter's House. "Speaking of which, it must be getting on to lunchtime, and I need to check into my office. C'mon, I'll show you where Pamela Abelard writes her masterpieces."
There was a small white marble statue on a pedestal to the side of the path as they approached Abby's workroom. The statue, worn down from centuries of weather, had wings and a round face tilted toward heaven: a little fool's angel, snowblind with innocence. The double entrance doors to the renovated carriage house were fourteen feet high. They were from a Spanish monastery, and each door with its intaglio of doves and sloe-eyed saints weighed several hundred pounds. But they glided open noiselessly upon verification of Abby's palm print.
"Better than a padlock," she explained. "I guess I'm overprotective of my work space."
Inside, on two walls paneled in speckled bamboo, were blowups of the covers of Abby's six novels, two abstract canvases—a Frankenthaler and a marvelous sunset-colored Hofmann—and a carved seventeenth-century Pegasus. Joe identified the two artist
s before she could tell him.
"You know something, Cap'n Bryce? You're not the uncouth, tobacco-spittin' fast-and-loose blockade runner I always heard about. There's an artistic side to you, sir."
"When there's a war on, Miss Abby, it doesn't pay to show your sensitive nature to the enemy."
She loved the game, raising an eyebrow in response. "And how do you see me, Cap'n? As an enemy, a prize to be taken?"
He hesitated, but only for a moment.
"A beautiful woman can be my adversary; but never my enemy."
Abby blew him a kiss and with a sudden change of heart or mood wheeled herself to the Palladian window that framed another view of the gardens and, down an avenue of cypress trained on arches, a blue orb of Pandora's Bay.
"I was born out of my time and place, Joe. My true place. I love the Old South. Oh, I know. The slaves and the cruelty and the absolute abysmal folly of people who-thought that time tha tibthiti Their sense of grandeur was delusional and look what it got them—the bloodiest war in history. But still—I can't get the old romance out of my blood. Silly, aren't I?"
"No. You're honest and unaffected and you have a talent millions of people respect. A tragic accident might have turned you into a mean-spirited, unhappy, unevolved adult. I'm a doctor. I know what you had to go through to be where you are now."
"I keep to myself too much, I know that. But I was always a loner; I liked to find a pretty place no one else knew about and just sit there and think. It's who I am, I don't apologize. I can't bear to watch what's going on in the world most of the time. I hardly ever look at a newspaper."
She came back toward Joe, reached for a Sotheby's catalogue among many on one of a pair of round tables.
"This is what I like to read. I must look at a couple of hundred catalogues of estate sales a year. I love wood. These tables are inlaid with thirty-two kinds of wood from Jamaican forests. Oh, and I love bronze and pewter and old silver and ceramics, but there's nothing I love better than the smell of a new book, just off the presses."
She showed him the bookcases that revolved like a jeweler's display case so that she could retrieve, in only a minute or two, any one of fifteen hundred volumes; most of them works of biography and history. Some of them were rare editions. She communicated her passion for research by touching his hand, not once but several times, as she showed him book after book. He thought of her fingers as the roots of a starved plant, drinking him in. The more she drank, the more sluggish his heart felt to him. Because he'd already made up his mind that it wasn't fair, it shouldn't be.
There were manuscript files that contained notes and every page of her revisions. Her fan mail she preserved on microfilm.
"How many letters do you have here?"
"I don't know. I've averaged about 150 a week over the last seven years. I answer every one."
"Form letter?"
"We have stock replies to the most-repeated questions. Otherwise I dictate a personal response, enclose an autographed bookplate."
"I'd say you're as good a businesswoman as you are an author."
"I'm fanatical about taking care of the people who take care of me: my readers. As for the money—Luke looks after my investments."
"How are you related?"
"He's my uncle, my mother's brother. The Thomasons are all Low Country people. My father was an insurance man who loved the political jousts. He was mayor of Orangeburg when I was a little girl and had large ambitions, but he never lived long enough to go very far in state politics. A horse kicked him, and he died of a blood clot that went to his brain. My mother had a sore on her breast she was careful not to tell anyone about until it was too late. I went to live with Dr. Luke when I was ten: He was devastated when I—after I was crippled. We've always been real close. I'm only sorry he's never been able to straighten out his love life. Anyway, he's so proud of me now. I guess we're doing good financially. I ask him when I want to spend big on something like a little Degas bronze which I'm currently lusting after, and he almost always says, 'Go ahead, you can afford it.'"
A phone on one of the Jamaican tables chimed, and Abby glided across the pegged-board floor to answer it.
"Yes, Lillian. Ummhmm. Joe, you're staying for lunch, I hope? Yes, we have one guest, and would you ask Charlene if she'd like to join us? Thanks."
As she hung up, the entrance doors opened in their spookily quiet way and a slender black woman vith a cocklebur haircut came in, breathing hard, carrying a cardboard carton piled high with mail and packages. She looked curiously at Joe..
"Let me give you a hand with that," Joe said. He took the box from her and put it on one of the tables, next to a computer workstation.
"Frosty Clemons, Dr. Joe Bryce."
Frosty gave Joe another exacting look through round glasses rimmed in gold wire.
"You must be the one Daddy told me to be on the lookout for. Says they towed your Jeep Laredo back to town, on account of something was wrong with the transaxie. Whatever that is."
"I don't know, either," Joe confessed. "Pleased to meet you, Frosty."
Abby said, "Don't worry about it, Joe. We'll get you a lift to the hotel later on."
Lizzie came in looking a little sulky.
"You all went off and left me. Hi, Frosty."
"Playing hooky today?"
"No school." Lizzie flopped into a Colonial-style bamboo chair that looked fragile, and Frosty frowned at her.
"Break the furniture if you don't sit down in it right."
"Bamboo's as strong as steel, isn't that so, Abby?"
"One of the things I like about it. I wish bamboo could survive some of the winters we have here; I'd plant it all over the garden. Frosty, when you catch your breath, how about whipping up some brandy, Kahlua, and cream for us."
Frosty was bending over a legal-size folder containing contracts. "Abby—"
Abby made the wheelchair tires squeak on the floorboards. She had narrowed her eyes at this hint of opposition, like a cat suddenly exposed to bright light.
"Now don't tell me what Luke said. It's not like real drinking. It's the same as having dessert before we eat lunch."
Frosty straightened, turned briskly, thrust the folder of contracts at Abby and said, "Better look these over and sign them so I can get them in the mail today. You know it takes almost a year to get any money from your Polish publishers, once you get the contracts back to them."
"All right," Abby said meekly. "And please fix us a picker-upper."
Lizzie, yawning in her chair, said, "I'll have a glass of champagne."
"Shoot. What is this, a holiday I didn't know about? You call your mother today, Lizzie?"
"No. It's Friday. I call on Wednesdays and Saturdays." To Joe Lizzie said, "My mother's in a sanitarium. A sanitarium's where you go when you can afford to be crazy. Only I don't think she's crazy, really. Luke says she's just a very spoiled overaged brat."
The bar and refrigerator were contained in a Sheraton-style walnut breakfront that looked too perfect to be anything but a copy. Frosty Clemons opened the doors and began taking out bottles, which she placed on a sideboy with a spillproof top of faux marble.
"Can I give you a hand with those drinks?"Joe asked her. Frosty smiled just enough to be polite. His presence didn't exactly offend her, but she seemed wary of him.
Abby said to Frosty, "How's the new book read so far?"
Joe was close enough to see Frosty react; there was tension in her face, and for a few moments her hands forgot what they were supposed to be doing.
"Well—I think—it's bound to be your best one." She shot Joe a look, as if she suspected him of eavesdropping on her true thoughts, and took ice from the small fridge. Joe turned to Abby, whose face glowed in the light from the big Palladian window.
"Honestly? I have to admit it's been like wrestling a bear." To Joe she said, "I only read my own work once I have a complete manuscript to look at. Otherwise I might get discouraged and throw it all in the garbage. But if Frosty says I
have nothing to worry about—"
"Nothing to worry about," Frosty murmured, "except your eatin' and your drinkin'. Not enough of the first, and too much of the second."
Abby didn't respond. There was a slight fixed smile on her face and no movement at all. It was as if, posing for her portrait in the good north light, she had turned into the portrait itself: dusty, a little faded, neglected. She didn't blink when the telephone chimed again. Lizzie stared at her. Frosty sucked in a scared breath.
And then, suddenly she was out of it, stirring uneasily as if the shadow of something unspeakable had coldly fallen over her. Her teeth chattered; her head sank toward her breast.
"Oh, shit," Lizzie said softly, beginning to uncurl from her chair, but Abby raised her head almost immediately and looked at her in an unfocused, dreary way.
"Was that the phone?" she said. "Would you mind getting it for me, Liz? It might be Frosty. I can't understand what's keeping her today."
Chapter Fourteen
Driving home from the state capital in his recently purchased Dodge Ram pickup, Dr. Lucas Thomason took the interstate south to Charleston. There he stopped at Ridler Page on King Street to view a hand-colored seventeenth-century French map of the Carolinas he'd put a hold on. Seeing this rarity for the first time, he felt it was well worth the three' thousand dollars the dealer was asking. Then, across the street at another antiques dealer's shop, he picked up a flawless nineteenth-century painted sideboard Charlene had ordered, and, on impulse, a gift for his niece he thought she'd like: an Italian porcelain birdbath, complete with porcelain birds perched around the rim.
"Delightful," Rembarto said of the birdbath, a miniature just ten and a half inches in diameter. "Nothing in the store has attracted quite as much comment since the day it came in. Believe me, Mrs. Rutledge, it's the younger Mrs. Rutledge I'm referring to, is going to be very disappointed. But I always tell them, just a small deposit if you're interested." Rembarto shrugged delicately. "The recent reversals in the markets have affected so many more Charlestonians than would care to admit to the fact."